Greenlight: The days ahead

[Jesus Federico]

Hello there,

As a follow-up to the Community call we had today, I would like to sum up here the points we covered in benefit of the folks who could not attend the meeting.

As you know, Greenlight is a Ruby on Rails application that provides a simple interface for users to create rooms, start meetings, and manage recordings.

Since its first inception during the Fall of 2016, Greenlight has evolved and being repurposed several times.  Leading us to the development of version 2 during the Summer of 2018 and its growth in functionality to the point it is now in its latest version (2.11.2).

This evolution though, has not come short of challenges for several reasons. Being the main one the recurrent change of vision of the application itself over the years, but also the way the project has been managed. The consequence of this is an application that is highly complex, with some portions of code that are not entirely efficient and are difficult to maintain.

We (the team behind integrations) are the first in recognise that things can be changed and certainly improved. But because most of the changes we should do would be directly related to the architecture itself, instead of spending time and effort on patching or refactoring the current code-base, in the same way we did when version 2.0 was conceived, we have decided to do a full rewrite once again.

Version 3.0 will come with big changes, starting with the architecture and the components we use. 

This new version will be based on Ruby on Rails 7, and will use React 17 for the Front end. With PostgreSQL 14 and Redis 6 for data and cache, and Nginx to front end the deployment. It comes with visible changes to the user experience with a new concept for rooms and a new way of handling recordings and settings. And it also comes with some internal changes such as the way users and authentication is handled, and even how the application is deployed. 

In terms of functionality, we are pretty much implementing the same features we have in 2.0 but done in an different and improved way. Users and Administrators should not expect many changes in the way most features work.

For the development we have assembled a full team of Developers that work for Blindside Networks, who will be focused full-time on Greenlight during the next few months. The aim is to have a first release by the Fall 2022.

The development is being tracked on GitHub, so don't be surprised for the number issues and PRs are opened during the days ahead :)

We will be giving continuous updates through Community calls until the work is completed, so, stayed tuned.

Jesus

[Rudraksh Batra]

Great !

Really Excited to see the newer Version.

Regards

Rudraksh