About Zippy Stat

The Story

Zippy Stat grew out of a desire at :coderow to collect a bunch of simple statistics. In particular mileage for taxes, hours worked on non-billable projects and tracking of various marketing efforts. While there are applications to manage each of these things, they all fealt like overkill for what we needed. In addition, we didn't want to be jumping around from app to app all the time. So, like any good tech firm is apt to do, we decided to build something to solve the problem. Zippy Stat was born.

The Technology

Ruby on Rails

Zippy Stat was built using on Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails (quoting from the website) is a popular open-source framework for building browser-based applications using the Ruby language. It uses the Model-View-Controller architecture that encourages good software design by separating the elements that make up your data from their presentation. It lets a developer write easy to understand code by favoring convention over configuration, leading to better long-term application maintainability. Ruby and Rails also have a great community behind them, making writing for the language fun and collaborative.

Within the application we use a few different plugins/gems including:

• restful authentication
• message block
• calendar date select
• faster csv
• openrain action mailer tls
• uuid tools
• hoptoad notifier
• rspec
• selenium and the selenium on rails plugin

Charting

For the charts we use the Google Visualization API. This was a very hard choice for us. We opted to do the chart creation in the browser rather than the server, as the server load to do this generation seemed like it would be very high. The actual chart implementation that can be switched out quite easily, so we may opt for another solution as the application grows

The Environment

Hosting

We host this site with Heroku. Heroku is a platform for instant deployment of Ruby/Rails web apps.

Your Data

Your data is backed up via the Heroku platform via machine snapshots of the entire application. Multiple versions of these backups are automatically stored on the Amazon S3 platform and are available for quick restores if needed.

In addition, you are always free to export your own data. Go to the stat details page and select "Export". Your data will be exported in a comma-separated (CSV) format that can be opened in a text editor, spreadsheet application or imported into almost any database.

To learn more about Heroku's platoform, take a look at their specs.