Technology Powering PRX

A quick list of some of the technologies we’re using to power prx.org. We’ll add some fancy charts and graphs when we slow down a bit.

Ruby on Rails

• We’ve spent the better part of a year reworking the original Java web-app, adding new features, and improving on others. Rails is what we are riding.

Highlighted Gems

• aws-s3: AWS::S3 is a Ruby library for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service’s REST API
• erubis: Erubis is an implementation of eRuby.
• graticule: Graticule is a geocoding API for looking up address coordinates. It supports many popular APIs, including Yahoo, Google, Geocoder.ca, Geocoder.us, PostcodeAnywhere and MetaCarta.
• mini-magic: A ruby wrapper for ImageMagick command line.
• reliable-msg: This package provides reliable messaging and persistent queues for building asynchronous applications in Ruby.
• ruby-mp3info: read low-level informations and manipulate tags on MP3 files.

Highlighted Rails Plugins

• active_merchant: This library is supposed to aid in creating e-commerce software in Ruby. In the future we want to support all “good” payment gateways.
• active_messaging: ActiveMessaging is an attempt to bring the simplicity and elegance of rails development to the world of messaging. This is a project that PRX manages and maintains.
• acts_as_solr: This plugin adds full text search capabilities and many other nifty features from Apache’s Solr
• badges: Badges is an authorization plugin (as in “we don’t need no stinking badges” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_badges). Written for prx.org and now released to the wild.
• Comatose: is a micro CMS designed for being embedded into existing Rails applications.

Using the cloud

• We make extensive use of Amazon S3, EC2 and SQS to store, transcode and send messages about our audio files.