1. Patrick Crowley

2. Rails for Legacy Apps

3. (How to use Rails
with existing apps)

6. • New ideas

7. •New ideas
• No users

8. •New ideas
• No users
• Zero code investment

9. •New ideas
• No users
• Zero code investment
• Best case scenario

10. But, in the real world...

13. • Legacy content

14. •Legacy content
• Existing userbase

15. •Legacy content
• Existing userbase
• Front end (HTML + CSS)

16. •Legacy content
• Existing userbase
• Front end (HTML + CSS)
• Database Schema

17. Q: How can I use Rails
with a legacy app?

19. • Don’t! (Leave site as is)

20. • Don’t! (Leave site as is)
• Reboot site with Rails

21. • Don’t! (Leave site as is)
• Reboot site with Rails
• Or, maybe...

22. Use Rails as a control
panel to run your site

23. Case study:
Cinema Treasures

26. Front-end
Smarty
Blogs
Theater DB
pMachine
PHP/MySQL

27. How did we edit
theaters?

28. phpMyAdmin
(sadly)

30. • Intended for developers

31. • Intended for developers
• Easy to harm database

32. • Intended for developers
• Easy to harm database
• Doesn’t scale

33. Why not roll your own?

35. • Not highest priority

36. •Not highest priority
• Busy with other things

37. •Not highest priority
• Busy with other things
• I never want to write
PHP again.

38. Let’s do it in Rails!

39. Basic concept

40. Current site
Database

41. Current site Rails
Database

42. Demo

43. Issues I ran into

45. • Non-plural table names

46. • Non-plural table names
• Had to remove primary
id’s on join tables

47. • Non-plural table names
• Had to remove primary
id’s on join tables
• Needed a way to delete
cached templates on
db update

48. How long did this take?

49. 1 week /
2 - 3 hours per day

50. The End

52. New Theaters
6,000
4,500
3,000
1,500
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005

53. New Comments
50,000
37,500
25,000
12,500
0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005