Building a Robust Data Synchronization Service with Rails
At Zipline, we offer a one-stop shop application for retail employees that handles everything from clocking to task management and team communication. To achieve this, we need to integrate with numerous third-party applications with unique requirements. We decided to develop a satellite service called ZipIO for data synchronization. In this post, I’ll review our journey of building this robust and scalable system.
Language and Framework: We chose Ruby on Rails for its simplicity and productivity. However, we structured our core logic as POROs (Plain Old Ruby Object) to decouple the core logic from the engine that runs it.
Modular Architecture: We broke down the workflow into discrete steps: Signals, Commands, Outcomes, and Tasks. This modular approach allows for easy reuse of logic across different third-party integrations.
Asynchronous Processing: While we support synchronous operations for specific use cases, 99% of our workflows run asynchronously for optimal performance and scalability.
