for those of you that are lucky and dont deal with software development (stay that way, is a lot healthier) this post might sound like a trivial update, but is actually not.
we need to upgrade our CakePHP framework from 2.x to 4.x in the coming months, Cake is basically the “heart” of eramba and affects anything you do on the application. this is necessary to make sure eramba uses the latest technology, otherwise we become another prehistoric grc solution that is impossible to maintain.
Its forecasted to take %100 of our development manpower (sounds like a lot right? it isn’t) for three full months. during that time we wont be able to make any new feature, just (hopefully) small bug fixes. our guess is we’ll start in May 2020 and finish during the summer. anyway it doesnt look like we’ll be able to go anywhere for holidays at least here in europe.
Good news is after this eramba should work better, probably faster too. We’ll be able to focus on workflows and other features we would like to do this year. The bad news is we never did this before so we are not entirely sure how to do it or release it to thousands of people
well, a bit of an update … we wont be over until end of October as usual it took longer than expected or planned. we have been working on this full time and still lost some grip on it due bug fixes, etc …
We are testing and preparing how the migration will be to eramba_v3 (not v2), a few things you will need to prepare at the time of the migration (not now):
you will install the upgrade with a package using linux cli
you will run the package using your current version of php
after the migration completes you will need to upgrade your php to 7.4.x or 8.x (better)
We are hoping to contact customers during first weeks of April, we’ll try to help everyone over zoom with the migration
Hello James, yes we are not very good at deadlines, we finished online (also offline) update process so we are really close to release. We just need to test it carefully. Here is small preview of update process.
and also offline process
i had to strip the vertical axe to 50, some section took a lot longer than 50 seconds when fully loaded (first admin login, online assessments, etc)
in average, 3.x loads any section in 4.2 seconds while 2.x used to do the same db in 14.5 seconds…in average, it seems 3.x is 3-4 times faster. we believe it could go faster (3.x is not using caching yet) but as it stands now we are quite happy. the important is now if a section has many thousands of items, loading times wont be exponentially affected (as it would have happened in 2.x) … loading times even with many thousands of items should remain around 4-7seconds. in the past it took thousands of queries to load a section, in average now is 100-150 queries no matter the amount of items.
next tuesday we finish the migration, we will need the rest of the week for bug fixing…maybe the week after we’ll start communicating customers to upgrade to 3.x
We will start migrating customers over calls, the first batch of customers will be mailed this week and we’ll based on that migrate further customers. Is likely that all new (fresh) installs in August will use 3.x alone
we migrated 5 customers (our of 350) and we are working on migrating a few others this week working around some issues. In a week or two from now we’ll release an upgrade guide with videos, etc for everyone.
We have completed the migration for most our customers, so this project is complete. It just took nearly two years (our original estimation was 6-9 months).
