Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

One thing I’ve been working on recently is an update service for the Websites I’ve built. This would allow you to pull up a page on our Intranet similar to the “Windows Update Service”. The page would perform a check on our main server to see if there’s any bug-fixes, feature improvements or new modules that can be downloaded and installed.

Although it wouldn’t really by downloading since the file would be transferred from one Website to another. Modified files, data or database schemas would be moved from the update server to the new Website. The operator of the Website would immediately benefit from getting the latest updates from our company.

The way we currently do it, is that we manually move the files from one server to another. This is very tedious and time-consuming and not all that reliable either. If there’s anyway we can improve our service, this would probably be it.

I have already started working on the code for this. I’ve alread got a web service built that will deliver the database schema. I need to build the page that compares the schema on the update server with the locat (Website’s) database schema and see where the differences lie. Then, with the operators approval, the system can automatically update the database schema.

There is a lot of work involved in this. We have to be careful that we differentiate between upgraded code and incompatible modules. When we write specialized code for a client, we have to be careful that the update service doesn’t just overwrite the customized code with a more generic script. This would cause us to lose a lot of work. We have methods to get around this problem, but there is a lot more coding to do until this is complete.