Technology

This section provides a high level overview of the standard set of technology used in all projects.

Business Logic is written Ruby on Rails which is an open source web application framework. It allows for creating pages and building applications that gather information from the web server, talk to or query the database, and then render templates for the appropriate User Interface. Rails features a routing system that is independent of the web server (e.g. the page contents can be manipulated based on data or client User Interface).

Two WEB servers run on the server, each with multiple processes (the number of concurrent processes can be configured). The highest level WEB Server serves requested objects such as style sheets and images. The Application WEB server, multiple parallel processes, executes the Ruby on Rails programs interacting with the database, formulating dynamic WEB pages and returning to the client. Content and programs are pre-compiled to optimise performance, which is fast. All the content and structure on these WEB pages is held in a database and dynamically pulled together with associated style sheets.

Example responsive User Interface (UI)

User Interface (UI) development primarily makes use of the WEB technologies such as HTML, Cascading Style Sheets(CSS) and JavaScript (JS) with a strong focus on responsive interfaces enabling the UI to work equally well on desktops (Windows PCs and Macs), tablets and smartphones. The Bootstrap toolkit (as used by Twitter) is used to achieve a responsive UI. This also enables each site to have it's own look & feel (see bootswatch.com) or more elaborate styles such Unify (see wrapbootstrap.com). A dropdown list of styles is available to SiteInABox users enabling them to try out different look and feels. A website certificate can be configured for additional security and improved google search results.

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A leading database is used to store content. The database runs with multiple processes to improve performance.

Images and documents are held on the file system. Images are pre-processed before storing to a set of predefined sizes which enables the correct size image to be proved for the required look and feel (e.g. thumbnails for smartphones).

All data is backed up to other locations daily.

The Architecture is database and server neutral and is currently live with Microsoft SQL Server database on a Windows Server, PostgresSQL (very fast and advanced database) on several Unix Servers and SQLite database on a PC. Using Ruby Rails enables the database to be changed though configuration, without the need to change any code.