A Rodakase retrospective: 1 year of dry-rb in production
One year ago, we shipped the world’s first production app using Piotr Solnica’s “Rodakase” stack. It was the new Australian Literary Studies website, the first complete online archive for this venerable Australian journal.
In the time since then, Rodakase moved out of its experimental phase, and we (along with Piotr and the dry-rb core team) broke it up into dry-web-roda, dry-web, dry-system, and dry-view. Our own call_sheet gem became dry-transaction, and many other gems sprung up to flesh out the dry-rb ecosystem. Along with this, rom-rb moved from version 1.0 to 2.0 and now 3.0, and rom-sql and rom-repository saw their first 1.0 releases.
What a busy year! We saw a lot of changes as the gems improved and stabilised.
Over this whole period, though, the Australian Literary Studies site kept ticking along reliably, with little need for change itself.
This week, I updated the site to this whole new world of dry-rb and rom-rb gems. It was a 4,000 line diff (a roughly equal number of additions and delitions). And the effort required? Only 2 days!
When we started on this journey, we predicted that our development approach would improve our lives as app maintainers, and this is turning out to be true: our little web stack is delivering everything we hoped it would.
