Harvest is on Rails 3! This is exciting news from the Harvest technical team. I’ll detail how the upgrade process went, but first a little history. The initial commit to Harvest was made on November 23rd, 2005 – five years ago. Back then, we ran Rails 0.14.1 and were still discussing how time should be entered into the Harvest. That’s five years of Rails releases since we started, and each upgrade was a painful but worthwhile experience.
I cannot stress that last conviction enough. Besides the obvious technical improvements an upgrade brings, there is also a morale boost from using the very best tools. This comes at a cost: Upgrading a key dependency is challenging for an app of Harvest’s size.
Name Lines Controllers 12K Models 25K Views 28K Helpers 7K Libraries 3K Functional tests 18K Unit tests 20K Selenium tests 2K Our Javascript 10K Harvest also has 32 plugins, 82 gem dependencies, our widgets, mobile apps, and Co-op integration. These are all potential breaking points during an upgrade.
Good for the people at Harvest for keeping up with the latest version of Rails (and friends)! Having been part of upgrade projects myself, I know how difficult and nerve racking it can be to upgrade to new platform versions.
I love how Dee points out the morale boost that comes with knowing you are developing with the latest and greatest.
First and foremost, I am a husband to the most incredible woman alive, a father of four amazing children and in general, I love being alive.
