This latest iDashboard update will be by far the biggest technical undertaking by iProperty since the initial release (internally we’re calling the update Madre Grande – Big Mumma), and it will be the culmination of more than 10 months planning and development. Needless to say, we’re pretty excited about it!
During that time, we’ve been listening to your much valued feedback, gauging what you do and don’t like about iDashboard, and by far the most responses we’ve received were concerning website updates, report generation, and irksome property categories.
About this update
Our latest update will aim to eliminate all these issues, and provide a solid foundation for our vision of where iDashboard should be. This is just the tip of the iceberg for what we have in store this year, but before we can do any of the exciting stuff we had to get our house in order, so to speak. That’s why much of the work for this update has been technical. For those interested keep reading below for the juicy details, but for the faint-of-heart, heres a quick rundown:
- Instant and more visible property syndication.
- Instant handout report generation.
- Faster email and SMS sending.
- Flexible property syndication targets.
- Less ambiguous property categories.
- More responsive interface.
Our next major update after this aims to concentrate more on your experience through iDashboard, and how we can make information even easier to access.
Please keep the feedback coming – its the best way to help shape a product you use every day. We’d especially love to hear from you all about the things you find hard to accomplish, or just downright annoying in iDashboard!
Check back soon, over the coming weeks we will be providing more detailed information about each of these upgrades, how it will work and how you can use them to your advantage.
Read ahead for the juicy technical details…
The Long Road to a Rails Upgrade
You may not be aware of this, but iDashboard is a Ruby on Rails application. With this release we will be upgrading to the very latest version which includes database request caching, more speed, and a more enjoyable coding environment. If there’s time, we might push on to using Rails 3.0 if we find it’s stable enough.
The upgrade to Rails 3.0 will allow us an easier migration path to Ruby 1.9, which will provide additional speed improvements.
Faster Data
The next biggest part of this update revolves around the upgrade of our database. Its taken us 3 years of development on iDashboard to get it to a point where we’re able to replace it with a shiny new PostgreSQL database, on the fastest server money can buy. We’ve also added in redundant and read-only nodes, employing similar technologies to Skype. The end result is a much faster iDashboard experience, and a much more capable database allowing us to present some very interesting data analytics to the user interface.
Smarter Minions
Another important upgrade was to our background processing system. Introduced in July 2008, this custom written system has done all the heavy lifting of iDashboard behind the scenes, speeding up our UI and simplifying our codebase. You can think of it as having a team of minions serving iDashboard’s every whim.
It’s served us well, and saved our hide many-a-time during peak load periods, but we’ve finally reached a point where iDashboard has outgrown it. After a brief ceremony, we laid it to rest, replacing it with a system called Resque which was created and employed by one of our favourite sites, GitHub. This gives us a much smarter method of categorising work, and gives us greater control of how quickly things can be accomplished.
To give you an example, updating a property within iDashboard will fire off upto 20 jobs in our system, from Geocoding the property to firing off emails and updating your website. With our old system these jobs were handled on a first-come-first-served basis, which was great until the our client base grew significantly and we found that updating the websites could cause reports to take a long time to generate. Our new system allows us to distribute this work over 8 servers in a more efficient manner, allowing reports to always generate irrespective of how many property updates are running.
New server environment
Finally, we will be completing our server environment upgrades. Since July 2009, we have been incrementally upgrading and virtualising our servers (using Citrix XenServe). This has enabled us to get more out of our servers without worrying about software conflicts, as well as providing greater redundancy. We’re now running a large number of Virtualised servers, each with 16 GB of ram, and each are hooked into our 7 TB file server via two 1 gigabit switches running at full-duplex. With this setup, we’re running all our websites, serving millions of images a day, as well as running iDashboard, and will serve us well for all our grand plans for this year.
If you’ve made it this far, we commend you, and thank you for your interest.