The client is an established internet business company in the US that has and sells a collection of more than 100k+ works of art essential for teaching Ancient Art, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Non-Western, Early Christian, Medieval, Renaissance, etc. Its clients are mostly educational institutions.

In early 2008 and until now, our three developers come and serve as the sole maintenance and upgrade team for this existing Rails application.

Interesting experience includes:

• Careful usage of ActiveRecord vs direct SQL statements because of the large data sets that we are manipulating
• Image slideshow using Lightbox
• Image zoom and pan using javascript, combined with the slideshow
• Using Prototype Window for login form.
• Using Internet Imaging Protocol (IIP) to display, zoom, and pan large images (each about 50MB)
• Using Rjb(Ruby Java Bridge) and jexcelapi(excel parser/writer for Java) to be able to import a large spreadsheet faster
• Using shoulda and cucumber
• Using factory_girl fixtures replacement
• Using CruiseControl for automatic build tool /continuous integration tool