The application is using Ruby on Rails with a Mysql database in the background. Apart of the public part of the application, there is an admin interface which allows Peter to update the data. Since I worked on this project only sporadically in my spare time, two challenges proved to be more complicated than expected:

1. Versioning of changes:
   We tried to make changes of the data transparent to the user. It should be visible to the user, when information has been changed, for example when a composition has been published, or other data is corrected. Hence there is some change history.
   However, not all changes should be mentioned – simple corrections of typos etc. should be ignored.
   Finally, the versions must span several tables as there are a lot one-to-many or many-to-many relations.
2. Synchronisation:
   Most of the research is done offline, for example in libraries or when travelling. Therefore there exist two installations, both being “productive”: the official homepage plus an offline installation which is used during the research.

Both problems can be solved, but there is no “out-of-the box” solution. There will be some detail about how to solve these two issues in a Rails application in following posts.

Today I have installed a very first version of a complete relaunch of the old homepage of ‘Music for Oboe’ on Beauty of Code: the Haynes catalogue. ‘Music for Oboe’ is a quite complete listing of compositions for the oboe in the 18th century, which has been collected and published as a book by Bruce Haynes. Several years ago, this data has been made available on music for oboe using a simple Perl application by Peter Wuttke.

Since then, a lot of musicians all over the world contributed to this list, so that Peter and I decided to completely rewrite the application using Ruby on Rails. Well, actually I wrote the application while Peter checked lots and lots of libraries all over Europe to find new works or to validate the information given by others.

Needless to say, there are still a lot of things to do until the final version will go live.