Client: Caunce O’Hara

Project Description

Caunce O’Hara (CoH) is a large well established insurance broker in the centre of Manchester. They have a number of insurance sectors they specialise in and have a website for each offering. Cake Solutions (Cake) was asked to come up with a solution which provided CoH with a modern platform from which they could grow their online business and easily add new sites as and when required.

Cake decided to build a platform using Ruby on Rails which is a popular open source technology, this ensures there are many companies who could continue with the build of the system in the future. It’s also a very cost effective web development technology as it allows sites to be built very quickly whilst providing very good performance and stability. New CoH sites can be added to the platform very quickly and cheaply making it a very cost effective platform.

Technical Description

Caunce O’Hara’s insurance platform is built on the full stack web framework, Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails, thanks to it’s foundation on Ruby, as well as it’s micro-frameworks allowed us to rapidly build a complex site. If it were built in a more “traditional” enterprise language it would have taken exceptionally longer.

We took advantage of many well tested open source Ruby gems and plugins – such as Paperclip for attaching files to models, Cucumber for Behaviour Driven Design, Factory Girl for fixtures replacement in testing, ActiveMerchant for payment processing and Prawn for PDF generation, to name a few. We’re using a MySQL database due to the hosting partner CoH already has, however with Rails we can deploy to any database since Rails’ ActiveRecord is database agnostic – so it’s trivial to migrate to another database platform in the future. We’re also using Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails / mod_rack for easy deployment and Ruby Enterprise Edition for performance improvements.

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