Platform Upgrades v5.0.0

Major Updates

• Completion of long overdue upgrade to Rails v5.2
• PostgreSQL v16
• CI Migration to GitHub Actions Codecov:
• 1800+ new automated tests: coverage 81.4% (+3.1%)

What's Next

• We're making it faster by replacing some old tech
• We're simplifying the design to make it easier...
• ... which will also make it look nicer

From a developers perspective

The upgrade to Rails 5 has taken several years due to the complex restructuring of the codebase to make it compatible and the challenge og competing workflows. Extensive work has been done on parallel staging and improved test coverage to ensure that this upgrade goes smoothly. The past few months have seen live running of both versions, meaning ongoing fixes had to be deployed to both platforms, which was difficult at times.

However work has been done that has set the scene for rapid iteration; we are aggressively targeting versions 6 and 7 in Q2 with Rails 8. Giving us the opportunity to overhaul the user interface, currently running on a dated Bootstrap theme with heavy customisation. To a more modern and lightweight minimalist approach ideally suited to mobile devices.

We are planning to integrate search into the PostgreSQL database layer, taking advantage of PostgreSQL 16 native full-text search, and removing dependency on an outdated Elasticsearch layer. This should improve search accuracy and eliminate any caching issues caused by maintaining two layers.

We will also be looking to take advantage of some of the features that modern Rails has to offer; ActionJob's native background jobs remove external dependencies on Redis and Sidekiq, further simplifying the architecture, and utilising HotWire Turbo and ActionCable, providing tools for faster inline page response, bringing desktop application-level performance to the web.

There's a lot planned, hope you like it!