Hubbub is a new deliveries service that rounds up notable local shops and provides a single shop-front for them all, allowing customers to pick from the best grub in their borough. Selected for their repute, their ethical standards and their quality, the Hubbub shops collectively offer an alternative to the homogenised offerings of the cartel supermarkets, bringing their individual flavour to their community over the web.

With a butcher, a baker, a and greengrocer in Hubbub’s first catchment area, it is feasible to get your week’s shopping on Hubbub, yet the up-market range of cakes, wines and chocolates means hosting your fancy dinner party won’t be tarnished by ‘taste the difference’ wrappers.

Currently, the site delivers only to Islington, London, with plans to expand to other London boroughs. The site is scoped entirely around these delivery zones, which determines what products and stores are displayed. One technical challenge of the site is ensuring that customers, stores, products, deliveries, refunds, orders and shopping baskets don’t drift from Islington to Fulham. (If you wish to try-out the website, try putting in the example postcode provided). Rails helps out by using nested routes to allow us to scope resources within an area, so that our URLs are always prefixed ‘in-your-area/:id’.

But this was no straightforward e-commerce shopping site. Partly down to the ambitious nature of the developers at Head London when planning the project, the site is a full-blown delivery management system that runs the entire Hubbub business, which is a genuine on-line company. The site has to be aware of what deliveries the Hubbub drivers are available to make, and track customer’s shopping baskets on the website to the delivery slots. These slots equate to hours in the day of the customer’s choosing, when they would like their goods to be delivered, and each have a capacity. So the checkout process has to be integrated with this system, to ensure that Hubbub can fulfil the orders the website is taking.

Hubbub also has a sophisticated payment mechanism, beyond the scope of most normal payment-processing use cases. Due to the nature of selling locally-sourced produce, some items may fluctuate in price from the point they are ordered to when they are delivered; items sold by weight such as meat and cheese may vary, especially when whole items are needed, such as a 1 kilogram chicken might actually vary depending on the individual bird. This plays havoc when coding a quantity, price and order total system, of which Hubbub has an elaborate variety of options for the administrators populating the database. To support this change in price, we take a nominal amount to verify the card, refund it and then process the order, which may have radically altered afterwards, some time after. Using SecureTrading and XPay, we were able to realise these special use cases, without compromising on security, and without storing sensitive credit card information. We built an open-source rails gem called breadmachine, which is capable of handing 3D-secure redirects and standard authorisations transparently.

Joining an in-progress project of this size was quite daunting. Given a use case or issue ticket, to comb through fifty model classes and determine what to change made for a steep learning curve. The complex object graph of Hubbub meant that making insular changes was difficult; sometimes a feature ran through the entire system meaning that sufficient tests for regression became an immediate need. We ditched the fixtures, which were becoming unmanageable, with NotaHat’s Machinist to mock the objects, trading the relative ease of object instantiation against an increased test suite running time.

Hubbub enters a busy and unproven, yet growing market of on-line groceries. Some have their doubts, but I think that this market has huge potential. When the quality of locally-sourced produce is considered, as well the environmental benefits, its easy to see on-line groceries go the way of the mobile applications market – initially an expensive and questionable area but eventually viable and sustainable.