Roll Foward!
If you are in software development or technical operations of any kind, you are probably familiar with the term “Roll Back”. For those of you who are not in either camp mentioned above, allow me to provide a brief definition:
Rollback: To return the system, software, or database to some previous state (hopefully the state prior to your deployment).
Back in August of 2010, our teams at Fellowship Technologies started on the long road to continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is the notion that you engineer your software to allow for a continuous deployment through all environments, up to and including Production (with little to no manual intervention). It is also the notion that your engineering practices are so solid that each change you make to the system is backed by a series of automated tests written by the development team. This of course provides confidence and…
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Picture this, image updates & creates through the REST API
We just released another API update. You can now create and update images from the People realm:
Any cool ideas on what you can do with this? Let us know what you’re doing with the API realms via twitter or forum.
Nick Floyd is an Architect for Fellowship Technologies (part of Active Network). Currently he is focused on improving, designing, and building the architecture around the Fellowship One platform. He likes learning about new technologies and languages (the obscure and the vanilla) as well as learning about new trends and practices around getting really good software from development to the users, fast. He is passionate about software development and helping other developers.
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A REST API double shot : Groups and Events realms
We’re back again to bring you two new realms for accessing your data via FellowshipOne. The Groups Realm and the Events Realm are the two newest members of our API family! The Groups Realm opens up access to Fellowship One’s Groups 2.0 features and allows churches and vendors to create new Groups 2.0 capabilities or integrate with other solutions. The Events Realm provides access to a primary event that can be associated with a Group within the Groups Realm.
Note: The Events Realm does not at this time provide access to Fellowship One Activities, Check-in, or Event Registration.
Groups resources
Groups
Members
- Members: Search (3rd) | List (3rd) |…
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Increasing Software Delivery by 500%
TL;DR (Too long; didn’t read)
We are deploying software faster with a simple push of a button. This year alone we have deployed code to production 10 times versus 2 last year which is 500% more deployments this year.
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Quick people API realm update
One of our consumers was nice enough to let us know about an “undocumented feature.” Normally with bug fixes and small enhancements we’d just deliver the changes and let the docs tell the story, however, this change is around a more sensitive area and wanted to make sure that everyone knew about it.
The change is to Creates and Updates of the people resource on status/comment.
Prior to the change if you either
[POST] https://churchcode.fellowshiponeapi.com/v1/people + a payload with a value for status/comment
or
[PUT] https://churchcode.fellowshiponeapi.com/v1/people/[id] + a payload with a value for status/comment
The value for the “comment” node would not “create” or “update.”
This has been fixed to now do what you might expect it to do in your sand box environment and we are planning on pushing the change to production tomorrow. If you have a chance please go check it out and let…
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Introducing the new REST API giving realm
The dev team has been working hard to bring you the next step in the Fellowship One REST API stack - the Giving Realm! We’ve opened up all sorts of resources to help you bring giving into your church. From accounts to sub funds - all the resources you’ve been asking for served up on a RESTful plate.
Realms
You might also notice that we are using a new term to classify our API resource sets: REALMS. Realms are how we will be classifying groups of functionality exposed through the APIs and will help you manage your consumption through segmentation. The realms will provide churches with the ability to allow or restrict what data consumer applications use and they will enable developers of consumer applications a platform to request specific application keys for specific functions a al carte or application keys that cover the entire stack. For instance, when…
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Raising the bar…
Raising The Bar Announcement from Fellowship Technologies on Vimeo.
Fellowship Technologies started in 2004 and finished that year with 60 churches; this past year we added 465 churches and are now serving over 1,700 ministries worldwide. When we came to market, Software as a Service was a relatively new concept and we were able to offer our church partners capabilities that were not available in other solutions. And now it’s time to raise the bar again.
Today we’re announcing that Fellowship Technologies is joining Active Network, a fast-growing Software as a Service company that wants to foster the growth of communities and businesses and help people participate in the activities they love.
Check out this post for more information.
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Intro to Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language that makes it easier to develop, deploy and maintain web apps. Rails uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming.
It includes tools that make common development tasks easier “out of the box”, such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a simple ruby web server, and Rake, which is a build system.Together with Rails these tools provide a basic development environment. One of Rails’ biggest strengths is metaprogramming, Rails introduces the Active Record framework, a design pattern by Martin Fowler. The rails version of Active Record discovers the columns in a database schema and automatically attaches them to your domain objects using metaprogramming. Rails also relies on convention over…
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API Strategy & Roadmap
Looking back, only for moment…
Almost a year ago to the day, Fellowship Technologies deployed the Fellowship One REST API into production. We were excited to achieve this milestone since it represented months of dedicated work by our development team. Since then committed developers, vendors, and our own staff have come together to form a Community dedicated to bring solutions to the church world. I am encouraged and edified by the fantastic work that has been accomplished. Good work!
If you cook it, then you better be prepared to eat it…
We believe that the best way to prove our API can accomplish what others need it to accomplish is to use it ourselves. No… I am not talking about for just some things like a mobile app that does this, or a CMS shared login, or vendor solution integration. I am talking about using our own API for the…
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Staging/Sandbox Environment is Back up!
Sorry for that downtime, but good news…it is back up! Go have fun creating with the API! And we want to make sure we give credit to our awesome TechOps team here at FT for getting the environment back on it’s feet. That’s a group of people that do a ton of awesome work and you rarely hear about!
**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!
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Downtime in Sandbox/Staging Environment
Just a quick note to let you know that we are currently experiencing some unexpected downtime in our Sandbox/Staging environment. Sorry for any issues that may cause you, we’re working to get it back up as soon as possible. For the quickest notification when it is back up (and a lot of other great stuff), please follow us on Twitter @F1Dev!
Thank you for your patience!
**Also, since this is now taking the spot on our home page, be sure to check out our newest blog post “Android & OAuth” by our developer, Kelly!
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Programming in F#
F# became a first class citizen in Visual Studio 2010. What is F#? F# is a multiparadigm programming language built on .NET, which supports functional programming, object-oriented programming and imperative programming (F# allows you to modify the contents of memory). F# is also statically typed but has type inference built in it. Most of time, the programmers don’t need to explicitly put the type annotation for the variables/identifiers since the compiler will automatically figure it out. For example, let a = 1 is a valid expression. However, the real story will be let (a : int) = 1. Because the compiler can figure out the type of a is int, the programmer doesn’t need put the type when he introduces the value a.
A while ago, I found a problem on the MIT website. Here is the problem: You are given an arithmetic expression containing N real numbers and N…
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NoSQL: HuMONGOus Benefits (Part 2)
At Fellowship Technologies we’ve utilized NoSQL as a persistent caching mechanism. We used MongoDB as our NoSQL data store. MongoDB is a document-based schema-less data store. MongoDB was an ideal solution because we had a dataset where we needed to cache a dataset with a varying set of fields.
Installing Mongo
To install MongoDB go to the MongoDB site and choose the right version for your platform. If you have an OS with 64-bit capabilities then you should choose a 64-bit version of MongoDB because the 32-bit version has a 4GB memory limitation. Since MongoDB relies on memory mapped files the 4GB limit doesn’t necessarily pertain to the size of your database. Extract the MongoDB files from the archive. Go into the bin folder and run mongod to run the mongodb server. Specify the
—dbpathflag to specify the directory where the data files will be created and…Read the whole entry...
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Our Scrum Team Structure
At Fellowship Technologies, we value team work and collaboration. In fact, as part of our Scrum implementation, we tend to focus on creating self-organizing teams that strive for excellence on the first principle of the Agile Manifesto (individuals and interactions over processes and tools). Who better to estimate and organize the work at hand than the people actually doing the work? This creative and cohesive environment is one that we value for each of our teams.
As we grow in experience and education, we adapt and change your environment which in the end makes us all stronger. That is what I love most about our teams, their ability to look back, adapt to the realities seen, and strive to do better today than they did yesterday.
In our Product Development organization, we currently employ three (3) Scrum Teams. While each team should be able…
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NoSQL: Leaving Schema Behind (Part 1)
Recently at Fellowship Tech we deployed a new feature that takes advantage of a new type of data store called NoSQL. Specifically we used MongoDB as the backing data store for this feature. During this process we have learned a whole lot about NoSQL through our development and testing that I feel merits sharing.
New data store design: NoSQL
In recent months there has been a lot of chatter about this new way of storing data called NoSQL. NoSQL is currently defined by the community as data stores that are schemaless and non-relational. There are two types of NoSQL databases.
Key-Value Stores
Key-value stores work just as you would think. You store a bunch of key-value pairs that are grouped similar to a row in a relational database. For example, one row can have FirstName=Jesse,LastName=Dearing and the next can have FirstName=John,MiddleInitial=Q,LastName=Public. Some key value stores include Redis,
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Your Feedback…and a $25 Gift Card!
Did you know we love feedback? Well, we do!
Today we just sent out a survey to some of your email addresses, but we want to learn from everybody, even if we didn’t get an email out to you.
All you have to do is fill out this survey, which should be a pretty quick task. And, if providing feedback that will shape the future of our API isn’t a good enough incentive for you…we’re going to sweeten the deal! If you complete the survey by 5:00pm CT on Tuesday, June 15, you’ll be entered to win a $25 iTunes gift card! Sweet, huh?
So there ya have it, we want to learn from you and would love it if you filled out that survey!
And no, you can’t fill out the survey multiple times to have a better chance at the gift card…sneaky idea though!
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A Scrum Ceremony? Is this a wedding or something?
Ceremonies. Pretty fancy word when talking about software development right? Maybe we should walk around saying we are headed to the next ceremony all the time, but we think that would be weird. So from now on, let’s call these ceremonies…meetings. So what are all these meetings about? That is what this blog post is going to explain. 2 quick notes before we dive in… 1) There are only 4 meetings that are prescribed in Scrum with most implementations adding a fifth. 2) These meetings occur to facilitate collaboration, inspection, and adaptability to the realities seen throughout a project.
Planning
This is a meeting that occurs before an iteration begins. The team negotiates with the Product Owner the items that will be worked during the iteration. Once the negotiation has ended, the Product Owner agrees to not change the items before the iteration is complete (2-4 weeks). The team…Read the whole entry...
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Data Exchange API Fixes
We wanted to give you a quick update to let you know about 2 items that went into our Production environment to fix some bugs in our Data Exchange API. Here are the 2 areas that were affected…
- Communication Audit Dates
We fixed some issues around searching for communications based on their audit date (creation date or last updated date) and also fixed an issue where the audit dates were not being presented in the results. - Household Source Code
We tidied up a couple of issues around the householdSourceCode to make sure it is a unique value within your church, accepts alpha-numeric values, can be cleared by inserting ‘null’, etc.
If you have any questions or comments regarding these fixes, please feel free to comment on this post or head over to the Forums and let us know. Thanks again for being a part of this…
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F1 Check-in on the iPad
We just recently heard that someone had found an app that would allow them to run Fellowship One Check-in on their iPad! After hearing this, we couldn’t resist trying it out on our own to see how it worked, and that’s what we did. The overview of how this is happening is through a Remote Desktop Connection. This means that the iPad is acting as a viewer, showing you what is happening on your full PC. That means this process still requires a computer capable of running check-in, but now you can view/use it on your iPad! So, let’s walk through how we set it up and got it working!
1. Enable remote connections to your Windows Check-in PC
-Go to your Start button and right click on “Computer” and then click on Properties
-Make a note of your computer’s name, you’ll need this…
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Be the first to get the news & tips!
We think you should subscribe to this blog!
It’s true that one of the reasons we want you to subscribe is because seeing that subscription number grow is just plain fun…it makes us feel good! But we’ve got a lot of reasons why we think it will benefit you too! Here are just a few reasons…- There are a lot of smart, full time developers sharing their knowledge here
- If you want to learn about the API, we talk about it here
- We talk about things coming up in our product, which is always fun to be the first to know
- You can learn web development by reading this blog
- We have fun and even occasionally give things away
- You get to read our posts in your favorite RSS reader
- and many, many more! (don’t you always…
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- Communication Audit Dates
- Building a custom login for your church website using the API
November 29, 2011 - Roll Foward!
August 9, 2011 - The Agile Triangle
July 27, 2011 - Conversation Paralysis
July 7, 2011 - Picture this, image updates & creates through the REST API
May 10, 2011
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