Support Details on Rails

We here at Imulus have spread our wings a bit and decided to get into the Rails game. I have had a crush on Ruby for a long time, causing me to jump on the Rails bandwagon when version 1.0 was in beta. I fell off the wagon before Rails 2 came out, being consumed by development work that wasn’t on the web. When Rails 3 and then Rails 3.1 came out with great support for unobtrusive javascript as well as the asset pipeline, several of us started to get involved again.

We’ve been wanting to continue work on Support Details for some time now. Since it was in .NET sitting on top of a homegrown CMS that it really didn’t need to be coupled to, our frontend developers had trouble moving forward on it. As a lark, I decided to port over the site to Rails. The main functionality was done in a couple of hours and we managed to iron out most of the other main points in spare hours over the next few days. We decided to update some of our detection to be way more accurate, and that took a few more days, but we can now tell if you are on Windows 3.1 running NCSA Mosaic

We didn’t want to stop there though. We were very excited about using CoffeeScript and Sass in the new Rails 3.1 asset pipeline to create readable code that could generate our Javascript and CSS. Taylor and Casey jumped onto migrating the existing Javascript and CSS over to using CoffeeScript and Sass. After running through the asset pipeline which would combine and minify our Javascript and CSS we had significantly reduced our asset download size.

While that was a great first step, we wanted to go further and make Support Details even faster. We started by using Delayed Job to send e-mails on a background queue, rather than tying up the main web thread. Then we decided that we wanted to take advantage of a CDN and so we used the excellent Asset Sync gem to compile and deploy our assets to Amazon S3/Cloudfront when we pushed to Heroku. After all of these changes our initial page load time was cut by more that half.

But wait, there’s more. We’ve had many requests to localize Support Details for different languages. Thanks to the support of various friends of Imulus, we are pleased to offer Support Details in Japanese, Russian, Italian and Portuguese. We plan on adding more languages in the future, and if you want to help in translation please feel free to give us a holler and we can send you a list of phrases we need for the translation.

We have a lot more planned for Support Details, and we have some more great Rails applications in the pipeline which we should be releasing for your viewing pleasure in the near future.