Reply to: Gov.uk named THE BEST THING Britain has made all year

[Sysman]

By all means contribute to open source, maybe they could have forked a dotgov variant tuned to their needs but they have started from scratch. I predict in 5 years there will be 3 people in the world who can support it and they will charge £5K a day.

Point taken and in Drupal's case there are regular security alerts which means plenty of competent folks are keeping their eyes on the ball.

FWIW a mate who was working in a university until he retired recently said a few years ago that RoR was all the rage with his students, so it's probably another case of using the latest and greatest fad toolset.

That £5K a day does sound attractive though

[vetran]

s/homebrew/bespoke/gl

?

Bespoke is passable description as well.

I chose Homebrew to give it an amateur feel.These guys whilst they may be adept with a sewing machine haven't sewn thousands of suits already and acquired a shop on Saville Row. This is the first garment they have made together.

My worry is that they could have used an existing standard tool and got support from people who have years of experience using it. There are security tools that know how to scan it and its monitored code in case of exploits.

There are thousands of installs of things like Drupal run by big and technically competent organisations, the bugs are beaten out.

This would be the safest solution for the size & criticality of the install. They could have also slid the link tester module in overnight.

By all means contribute to open source, maybe they could have forked a dotgov variant tuned to their needs but they have started from scratch. I predict in 5 years there will be 3 people in the world who can support it and they will charge £5K a day.

[Sysman]

Maybe its me, I'm not explaining myself well enough.

RoR=Development language with a framework (like C++ or Java)
Site Built on RoR= Internally developed solution for content management.(Homebrew)
Site Built with Drupal/Joomla=out of the box content management.(off the peg)

Forth & Visual basic have been around for decades but they aren't content management systems. If I developed a content management system in these to fix my own singular problem I would call it homebrew.

s/homebrew/bespoke/g

?

[Sysman]

That's a good example of a case where the site that has the ultimate content is still outside: direct.gov.uk is the old "portal" from Mr Blair's era which is in the process of being supplanted.

Here's another example: DWP - Services and benefits online - What do I need?

The service does not work properly with Macs or other Unix-based systems even though you may be able to input information.

You are likely to have problems if you use Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9 and 10, Windows Vista or a smartphone. Clearing temporary internet files may help but you may wish to claim in another way.

...
What the service was designed to work with

The service was designed to work with the following operating systems and browsers. Many of these are no longer available.

Microsoft Windows 98:

Internet Explorer versions 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows ME

Internet Explorer version 5.5 and 6.0
Netscape 7.2

Microsoft Windows 2000

Internet Explorer version 5.0.1, 5.5 and 6.0
Netscape 7.2
Firefox 1.0.3
Mozilla 1.7.7

Microsoft Windows XP

Internet Explorer 6.0
Netscape 7.2
Firefox1.0.3
Mozilla 1.7.7

[vetran]

also agree with the earlier point this is not a personal slight on NickFitz , it was a series of suggestions for improvement to an "award winning project" that I and others felt didn't cut the mustard.

[vetran]

RoR isn't homebrew as you call it. It's been around since 2004.

Maybe its me, I'm not explaining myself well enough.

RoR=Development language with a framework (like C++ or Java)
Site Built on RoR= Internally developed solution for content management.(Homebrew)
Site Built with Drupal/Joomla=out of the box content management.(off the peg)

Forth & Visual basic have been around for decades but they aren't content management systems. If I developed a content management system in these to fix my own singular problem I would call it homebrew.

[SueEllen]

That got me as well
the gov.uk is home brew Ruby on Rails.
data.gov.uk is on Drupal.

we have similar stuff where some expert won't use off the peg and writes their own. Then the off the peg moves forward with an upgrade and the home brew breaks completely at which point we panic because the guy who wrote the home brew stuff has retired.

Still think a broken link report is required.

RoR isn't homebrew as you call it. It's been around since 2004.

[DaveB]

It's exceptionally good because it completely eschews the frippery and excessive adornment that clutter so many sites, in favour of serving its primary purpose: to convey information as clearly and efficiently as possible.

As with so many things that appear simple and straightforward, this has only been achieved through an enormous amount of hard work by highly experienced designers, developers, user experience specialists, and not forgetting the infrastructure people that have put together a reliable platform for it to run on, and all at much less than most Government IT projects manage to spend on paper clips.

Obligatory disclosure: I know and, at other times and places, have worked with a number of people on the Gov UK team. They're some of the smartest, most talented, and most dedicated people I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Which didn't stop them completely screwing up all the public info on Clients old web pages when they transferred it, rewriting chunks of it without asking and leaving us with a site we constantly have to apologise for when external users tell us how bad it is.

[EternalOptimist]

I understand you banging the drum Nick, you have an interest. But you shouldn't tell the customer how great it is, you should ask him
and as a customer, I say it's crap


I have to start doing my paye on it soon, and Im blooming dreading it.

[vetran]

I don't know much about this new fangled technology but shurely:

That got me as well
the gov.uk is home brew Ruby on Rails.
data.gov.uk is on Drupal.

we have similar stuff where some expert won't use off the peg and writes their own. Then the off the peg moves forward with an upgrade and the home brew breaks completely at which point we panic because the guy who wrote the home brew stuff has retired.

Still think a broken link report is required.

[Sysman]

FTFY

Ooh Ooh Ooh.

Where do I send my invoice too?

[darmstadt]

The broken link isn't on their site, so there's not much point them using that.

Also, the site is written in Ruby on Rails, not Drupal

I don't know much about this new fangled technology but shurely:

Overview

data.gov.uk runs on a mix of Drupal and CKAN. To read more about the architecture see: Integrating CKAN and Drupal.

[NickFitz]

Which is cool, but to many people the government is the government, so they are going to end up taking the blame for a lot of stuff that doesn't work which wasn't their fault or anything to do with them. Just an observation.

They can handle it

[doodab]

The key point is, they've explicitly rejected the old ways of doing government IT, because they simply don't work.

Which is cool, but to many people the government is the government, so they are going to end up taking the blame for a lot of stuff that doesn't work which wasn't their fault or anything to do with them. Just an observation.

[NickFitz]

TBH I think the main issue here is that they are calling themselves gov.uk. To my and many other peoples mind that means anythingatall.gov.uk. So they are going to take the stick for everything else that isn't working.

Eventually, everything will be under them. For example, go to http://fco.gov.uk/ and it will redirect you to https://www.gov.uk/government/organi...nwealth-office as of a few months ago. However it doesn't make sense to wait until everything can be moved in one fell swoop. That would be an unimaginably huge project, and those are what got government IT into such a state in the first place.

By starting small, they've been able to get a scalable infrastructure in place, and test it thoroughly on less important stuff. Now they've been able to take what they learned, and the tools they've developed along the way, and apply all that to bigger fish like the FCO.

Eventually everything will have been moved, but there's no point foregoing the benefits of making the new site and its improved facilities available as and when things are moved across rather than waiting several years for the big reveal.

The key point is, they've explicitly rejected the old ways of doing government IT, because they simply don't work.