Day 42

Alas, I missed my opportunity to blog last night. At least, however, I get to blog on this day of all days. Somehow, this day is the answer to life, the universe, and everything! Ok, enough on that.

Yesterday and today I learned a lot more about how the client's system really works. There is a huge amount of depth to it, and I have now dived fair deeper into its inner workings. Right now I am charged with the task of figuring out how the system sends out mass emails, or individual emails triggered from particular actions, like signing up.

There are 3 main components to this functionality and they are:
Redis - A non-relational database that stores data using simple key-value pairs. The data can only be searched for using the keys.

Resque - A delayed job system. It has a queue which you populate with some tasks, and when it has the chance it runs through the queue performing actions of the items.

ExactTarget - An email client which can be used to send out large quantities of emails, store templates, and keep metrics on the emails it has sent.

In conjunction, these systems create a convenient way to send out emails to user's for a variety of reasons.

Basically, the way it works is the Resque system populates a queue in the Redis database with tasks for ExactTarget.

So when a user, say, signs up for a membership, they need to be sent an email confirmation. You don't need this to happen immediately, but you do want it to happen within a few seconds. You don't want the sending of the email to get in the way of maybe the user refreshing the page or something. So you call Resque.enque( and then some task) so that the task will be put into a simple Redis database that can be accessed later. Once there is some extra time, the Resque system will start up a worker which will loop through all the items in the queue can calling a perform() method on the particular class or module which represents the task. The method, in the case of the email, will then gather up the needed information, package it, and then ship it off to the ExactTarget handler. ExactTarget will then begin the process of sending out this email.

There are lots of little steps that happen in between, like transforming the data to a fro xml and json objects, but this is the general gist of it.

Over all a relative interesting process to conveniently ship out emails attached to specific actions. It seems that almost all of the complexity is in the email client, and Micah has been cooking away at that. Hopefully be will be able to implement and expand upon the existing system in just a few days.