It's the little things that kill

Ever since last Sunday we have been working on completing our 2nd milestone: basic project setup as well as the paypal integration.

For the basic project setup the nested-set-model for hierarchical data turned out to be very efficient and easy to handle. Only with adding and subtractnig the correct values from the lft and rgt values one can move entire sub-trees around - this requires no more than three update statements. We like that.

For the paypal integration we use a gem called ActiveMerchant. Only after local tests the new version was uploaded to the server ... and ... bang ... did not work.

My first thought: Another environment problem that will take another week to fix (it did).

However instead of chasing around support guys and being miserable (again) I analyzed the setup to finally find the differences between the server and my local environment, that cause problems. After a while I remembered that there was that new rails version 2.3.2 that was released just after the beginning of the implementation. Of course I upgraded to the new version immediately - well - at lest partly.

There is some new stuff in 2.3.2 like syntax concerning includes, requires and rendering partials. Locally all worked well because version 2.2.2 was still used in the environment setup. On the server 2.3.2 was in use and all the differences poped up.

So I migrated the whole application from 2.2.2 to 2.3.2. I discovered it is quite a lot already - although far from complete. Some things need to be reorganized in order to have nice and clean setup. Oh well - in the end we are agile ...

The whole migration took from Wednesday to Friday (okay ... with a couple of beers in the park) - It's the little things that kill.