Using Mustache with the Play Framework
One of the more interesting stories that came out of our work on Individual Electoral Registration (IER) was our adoption of Mustache, a logic-less templating language.
Open standards for contact details and calendar events
Hello, I’d like to draw your collective attention to two challenges for open standards: exchange of calendar events exchange of contact information The date of the next bank holiday is one of the top needs answered by GOV.UK. I like …
Under the hood of IER
Last month we launched the new online electoral registration service. This is the digital part of the wider Individual Electoral Registration (IER) policy. Pete has already blogged about how we engaged with lawyers while developing the service. In this post …
Prototyping in Clojure
We recently completed an alpha on identity assurance for organisations. The objective of an alpha is to gain understanding of a service and validate a design approach by building a working prototype. As part of the alpha, we built a …
Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gems
When I started working on vCloud Tools, we had most of our functionality in one repository. There wasn’t a clear separation of concerns – the code was tightly coupled – and it also meant that a user who only wanted …
How we used vCloud Tools to provision a new platform
We recently moved GOV.UK to a new and improved platform. We used vCloud Tools, open source software developed in-house at GDS, to create the virtual machines and networks required as well as configure the firewall, NAT rules and load balancers. Why …
Building tools to provision our machines
Over the last few months, I’ve been leading a small team building tools to automate creation and configuration of our servers. Tools to automate provisioning Currently, our production environment is hosted with Skyscape, and we manage it using VMware vCloud …
Migrating GOV.UK to new infrastructure
On Tuesday night, we moved GOV.UK from one set of servers to another - with any luck, nobody noticed. Much of what we do at GDS is designed to be noticed in some way, usually because we are trying to …
Spotlight – a pure JavaScript application for GOV.UK Performance
Oliver Spindler, Tech Lead for front end development of the Performance Platform, explains how www.gov.uk/performance developed an innovative JavaScript workflow to allow performance data to be visible to everyone, while those on high-end browsers could have more powerful interactions. GOV.UK …
How GDS uses git and GitHub
Other teams around government frequently ask us about our use of GitHub, and rather than bury those answers in email it seemed time to follow Mike Bracken’s directive and publish (not send) our answers. I’ve made some assumptions here about …
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