Colophon for Alpha.gov.uk

This page lists some of the tools, services and datasources we used to built the alpha.gov.uk prototype.

Client-side and design

• jQuery
• jQuery UI
• Alternate Gothic No.3′, Clarendon FS Medium, Proxima Nova Light, Proxima Nova Semibold, Stub Serif FS, Reminder Pro Bold fonts from Fontdeck
• 503 error page illustration by Matt Blease
• Google web font loader

Server side

• Ruby on Rails (Ruby web development framework)
• Sinatra (Ruby web development framework)
• Django (Python web development framework)
• MySQL and Postgresql databases
• MaPit geocoding and information service from mySociety

APIs and datasources

• Scraperwiki
• Data.gov.uk Driving Centre API
• Directgov Syndication API
• Foreign Office API
• Direct gov list of local services
• Various other datasets from Data.gov.uk
• Geonames Gazetteer

Servers, hosting and server management

• Varnish (with a little extra load balancing from Amazon Elastic Load Balancer)
• Amazon EC2 running Ubuntu GNU/Linux
• Amazon S3 for backup storage
• Amazon CloudFront is used as a CDN
• Apache web server with mod_passenger
• DNS hosted by bytemark.co.uk
• Jenkins continuous integration server
• Puppet configuration management

Project management and systems

• Index cards
• Magic Whiteboard
• PB Works wiki
• Github code repository
• Lighthouse for bug tracking
• Google Apps
• IRC Cloud
• Hoptoad error alerting service

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