RMN Grand Palais - Images d'Art API

RMN Grand Palais - Images d'Art API gives full access to hundreds of images from RMN - Grand Palais photography fund and their metadatas - the greatest masterpieces from French museums, Art from all periods and continents, paintings, drawings, sculptures, medals, etc. are represented in this extraordinary base.

Project background

The RMN Grand Palais manages a fund of 850 000 pictures of 550 000 works from over hundred of museums, archives and institutions which can be seen on the photo agency website.

In October 2015, the RMN-Grand-Palais launched Images d’Art website, where you can browse, share and collect art.

In mid 2016 Nukomeet was introduced into ongoing project with role to implement new features into existing codebase, upgrade and maintain legacy code up to date with newest libraries, optimise hosting and maintenance.

Our involvement

RMN-GP was looking to cooperate with a technical partner who would help build the application and maintain it, including a complex backend connected to multiple third-party services. Through ongoing contact with the client, Nukomeet defined the needs and established detailed specifications that were used as a roadmap during development. The focus was on very high reliability and accessibility.

In order to speed up development and upgrade project libraries with dependencies we have migrated the application hosting form external provider hosting and maintenance to our custom build service with hosting, backup and load-balancing. Migration allowed to upgrade Elasticsearch to the latest release bringing new features and performance.

Technologies

The project is using Ruby on Rails as the core of the Images d'Art API. The architecture allows import and enhancement of data before public release. Elasticsearch processes images data and creates multiple facets for great search and browse experience.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a web application framework using Ruby programming language. Rails is a MVC framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer, and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for display and user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a search server providing a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.

Impact

Better control over hosting and maintenance. Faster deployments and upgrades. Optimized codebase adjusted to maintenance and new features and upgrades.