[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYHa62oA]

The last post was a proof of concept. Proof of concept has matured to a working system on Heroku thanks to our friends at the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE). These improvements allow a lower cost, easier to deploy system. With these benefits, it was a no-brainer for the Austin Time Exchange to abandon the edge branch and merge changes from the BACE fork in master.

This screencast shows the new 3 step heroku installation:

Click To Play

“Anyone can run their own financial system.” - Bernard Lietaer at the Naropa Intentional Economics workshop.

Thanks to Lee Azzarello, oscurrency can now be deployed to heroku with the master branch. For production use, the edge branch is preferred as previous testing in development and production has been done with edge. Also, two more items need to be worked on for heroku deployment. In edge, search is done with sphinx which heroku does not support. Since a community currency system generally does not need industrial strength search, perhaps this can be replaced with standard database queries. Also, the edge branch uses workling and starling for background processing of newsletter and forum post emails. Heroku uses DJ workers.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r-1MiN3lY4&hl=en&fs=1&]

OAuth support with the OsCurrency API was first demonstrated in January. Ruby on Rails developers may have noticed that I didn’t use ActiveResource with OAuth. Instead, in both the January screencast and the Twitter OAuth Consumer screencast, we coded in raw JSON. This was a bummer because, as easy as it is to write JSON, it is difficult to test, maintain and support. It would be much better if we could use ActiveResource.

Like the last screencast, this one is a result of a feature request. About 9 months ago to the day, I met Johnny & Eva Barnett at Spiderhouse Coffee through Karen Gifford, a board member of ATEN. Johnny suggested a groups feature be added to oscurrency. This happened one week after Rich and I presented the idea of using insoshi for a currency server at One Web Day Austin and first started checking in code. Multiple improvements made to oscurrency have been a direct result of Johnny Barnett’s help.