OneBody 0.7.6 and Update Agent
OneBody 0.7.6 has been tagged on GitHub. This release includes several bug fixes and a pretty solid Update Agent script. First, the fixes... Dan Taylor at PowerChurch Software has been contributing several fixes for bugs the last few weeks. PowerChurch provides a Church Management System (ChMS) solution, and they're working to ready OneBody as an offering to their customers, fully synchronized and ready to run. Many thanks to PowerChurch for their support of open source. * * * * Now, to Update Agent (UA). When I first started hacking on OneBody, my church hosted the software in-house, on a server inside our building. Synchronizing data from our ChMS to OneBody utilizing the Connector was relatively fast (well, fast enough), because it was all on the same local network. But as OneBody has grown from a little hobby project into a real product, and since our church and others are now hosting OneBody in separate VPS hosting environments, synchronization with the Connector is cumbersome and slow at best (meanwhile, it's just painful for syncing 20,000 or more people). OneBody now ships with an API and the Update Agent (updateagent.rb) script to ease the pain of hooking into a separate membership management database. With the ComsConnector, Cedar Ridge Christian Church performed every night a sync of 8000 people in about 1.5 hours and with hundred MBs or so of data transfer. Now, with Update Agent, synchronization takes literally minutes* and only the necessary data is transfered. REST API FTW!!1 Along with major speed improvements, the entire concept of syncing is within reach of more people. UA takes for its input a single CSV file. This should lower the barrier to entry for OneBody a notch or five. Documentation on the wiki is still lacking, but if you're interested in the new way to sync OneBody, crack open updateagent.rb and read the instructions at the top. I'll be working on the docs in the next few days/weeks, and the Connector idea will be depreciated in time. * First-time sync can still take awhile, but not every time — that's the key.
