To the Transifex Appliance users out there
Some time around the middle of 2008 I was asked if I would be interested in joining the very young QA department for rPath. I had already been working as a software engineer for them since late 2006, spending a larger chunk of my time working on a single project and not being able to experiment with the cool technology we were developing outside of my project. Somehow the idea of doing QA felt very appealing to me as I would then be able to see, first hand, what type of products we were publishing, as well as experience what our customers and users were going through. I jumped on the opportunity and the rest is history.
Shortly after the initial conversion and learning curve factor from going to thinking like a developer to thinking like a user were over, I decided that the best thing for me to do was to start using our tools on a daily basis. Not as I validated issues and tried to test use cases, but as a user or customer. Eat our own dog food! I started looking around for a good project to convert into an appliance, something that would benefit from a dynamic versioned controlled system. So about 1 year ago (12 months and 6 days to be exact) I started a new project on rBuilder Online called “Transifex appliance” based on the Transifex project.
What is the Transifex project, you may ask? From their web site:
Transifex is a highly scalable localization platform with a focus on integrating well with the existing workflow of both translators and developers.
It aims in making it dead-simple for content providers to receive quality translations from big translation communities, no matter where the project is hosted.
The Transifex Appliance is a self contained, all parts included with just enough operating system based on the rPath Linux distribution that allows you to get a full fledged Transifex installation ready to be used! Several image formats are available, including an EC2 image that can be deployed on Amazon’s AWS clouds with a single click of a button. It comes pre-populated with a couple of users and projects that you can play with as well as with its own web based appliance management interface so that you can manage system tasks such as taking a backup, updating it, start or stop services, view system logs, among other things.
Early on I decided to maintain the appliance to work in synchrony with the Transifex project itself, following the development (main) code line and finding issues as the code was being developed, and keeping a stable branch and updating it whenever a new released was published. This has worked fairly well for the project as they can identify issues right away and make sure they are handled before making it available to the public. It has also served as an excellent means for delivering quality software as the appliance itself is a pristine environment with no “contamination” from external dependencies and making sure that what gets developed is what you get!
During the course of working on this project I developed a very healthy relationship with the developers and the fruits of this “investment” have been returned to me (and I believe to the project as well) many times fold! I have learned a lot about the tools we’re developing here at work and have actually become a “perfect use case” for how our customers use our tools! The appliance has been downloaded a few hundred times in the last few weeks and this is what brought me to write this post!
You see, early on I had to choose a database to use for the appliance and the first thing that came to mind was the MySQL database. Turns out that when the Transifex project decided to launch a free web portal to showcase their product in the shape of Transifex.net, they chose to use PostgreSQL. I’m not facing the situation where I also want to switch the appliance to use postgreSQL but with so many downloaded images out in the wild, I wanted to know from the users:
- Would you mind the switch?
- Would you want a migration script to move your data between databases?
- Would you want this to be done automatically on update?
I really look forward to your feedback and please feel free to leave your questions or suggestions in the comments section of my blog.
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October 16th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
I am not currently a Transifex Appliance user, but would be more likely to use it if MySQL were replaced.
October 17th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
First off, let me take this opportunity to note what a great addition Og has been to the Transifex team, helping us in ways he can not imagine.
On the topic, PostgreSQL is better supported by our DB schema migration scripts, and is probably more suited for production systems. Having it as the default on the appliance will help us test it more and, I believe, make it more appealing to people wanting to deploy it.
October 19th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
first and foremost you are doing a really good work and its well appreciated. I never knew about transifex but reading your post has me all excited and revved up. Personally i would prefer a migration script so i can switch between the database. For one i love MySQL and would like to work with a MySQL db while another person might be crazy about postgreSQL. So having a migration script works best.