Advanced Community and Travel Portal

Scalable and load-resistant web portal for online booking and communication
Comprehensive social networking features
Elegant user interface providing for smooth user experience

Expertise

Web & Enterprise Portals

Content & Document Management

Social Networking

eLearning & Online Training

Verticals

Travel & Hospitality

Inspired by the idea of creation a single solution for end-to-end booking a vacation or business trip, our Customer was seeking a development company with profound technical and methodological expertise that would match his vision.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Results

Context

Our Customer had an idea of launching an online solution that would serve as a single access point for booking a vacation or business trip, while at the same time finding the best deals.

To bring the idea to life, they were looking for an experienced software development company capable to translate the blurred idea into well-structured specifications and build a fully featured and high-performance web portal based on them. Iflexion stood out among other vendors, because we offered not only multi-faceted expertise, but also full cycle development services – from business model creation and detailed specification development, to solution implementation and maintenance.

Solution

The community and travel portal we developed is interactive and links people who have traveled or will travel to certain destinations. People can search routes, purchase flights and hotel rooms, and, with the help of ScrybeTM technology, even offer or join rideshares (applicable to community members in a 30 mile radius). Users from same locations get to know each other, express their opinions about destinations, and find the best price for traveling.

This portal features the following attractive user-oriented options:

Rich UI built with the use of UX best practices;
Flawless and steady performance. Users interact with the system in real time and see the results of their communication immediately, without waiting for hours for the system to respond;
Increased loading speed and functionality. Since the pages reload partially, less time is wasted;
Simple and intuitive navigation bar;
Integration with social networks. Users of MySpace and Facebook save time on creating profiles by simply entering the URL of their profiles.

Development Process

During the initial one-month period, Iflexion team collected application requirements and wrote the product specification. We conducted intensive business analysis, suggested the vision of the product, and formulated a strategy of the portal’s further evolution. According to our client’s preferences, our central goal was to develop an AJAX-based advanced GUI with the use of floating windows that would interact simultaneously.

Technologies

Since the web application had to be scalable, ASP.NET framework was chosen. Iflexion employed Microsoft AJAX.NET library for its full compatibility with ASP.NET and allowance for development of new components and modification of existing ones. In addition, this framework is perfectly compatible with the vast majority of browsers and web services.

The NHibernate technology enables fast and stable work of the application. The database layer uses NHibernate for database objects relations mapping, which allows coding without paying attention to specific restrictions of the database used. AJAX.NET was employed in addition to ASP.NET, to increase website performance and improve user experience.

The solution is based on the traditional three-tier architecture: