DailyFitLog: Comprehensive Fitness Web Portal

Advanced e-learning web application for management entire students’ physical training process
Student progress analysis and CSV reports generation
Rich data visualization

Expertise

Business Intelligence

eLearning & Online Training

Verticals

Education

Iflexion delivered DailyFitLog education portal bringing bring together physical educators and students to manage student individual training plans and promote healthy lifestyle.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Results
Customer Voice

Context

Despite physical education policies are changing, one concept remains the same – physical activities and sports are central to battling obesity epidemics among school children. By inventing DailyFitLog, our Customer used the power of technology to bring together physical educators and students to manage student fitness data, create individual training plans, and promote the evaluation methodology based on activity rather than performance.

Unfortunately, the first version of the web application developed by an external vendor contained many errors, with some of them triggering the crash of the whole system. These functional defects needed to be fixed, alongside with updating the obsolete website design, and adding a number of new features.

It was important for DailyFitLog that the new website version was stable and ran flawlessly, and after some research, they chose Iflexion for the comprehensive analysis of the system and best ideas provided about necessary changes.

Solution

Iflexion created a modern highly optimized set of web-based tools, which serve the needs of both teachers and students. As students log information on their physical activity from their homes, it instantly becomes available for teachers to view via their teacher accounts. Physical educators monitor student physical activity level, and create classes and assignments to help students better achieve their goals.

Once a school implements the Daily Fit Log technology, the powerful reports creation engine becomes readily available to PE teachers and they can run fitness reports based on data entered by students within the school.

System Highlights

Students Fitness Data Management. Students log their physical activities in the system.
User management. The application supports four user types: students, teachers, school administrators, and site administrators.
School Management. The solution combines students into schools, classes, and custom groups.
CSV Reports. All data grids can be exported to a CSV file; and the user can create any kind of report using the MS Excel Pivot table feature.
Charts of Fitness Data help to graphically illustrate student workload and inspire them for further action.

Development Process

The key requirement was to create a program that would store all student fitness data logged in the student account. DailyFitLog wanted this data to be located in a database, which could be easily searched and sorted for further report generation.

Having analyzed the existing sources of the website, we suggested to entirely re-write the application, since it appeared to be the optimal way out.

The development process followed the agile methodology in order to have frequent deployments and preserve quality, while at the same time being able to make adjustments to the initial requirements based on impressions from the early versions of the system.

The project fell into four phases

The first phase was dedicated to requirements analysis and creation of page mockups. After the second phase, DailyFitLog received a fully functioning static application skeleton, which contained all web pages without the applied business logic. This phase helped to minimize the number of UI issues, which could have occurred during business logic development, and have a complete valid cross-browser skeleton at the beginning of the project.

During the next two phases, implementation and support, Iflexion specialists applied the business logic to the application skeleton and implemented all change requests.

Technologies

To implement all customer requirements, Ruby On Rails and Ruby technologies were used for several reasons. The solution is a database driven web application, which uses dynamic web pages that pull specific information directly from a database according to user requests. And RoR has rules and conventions that provide a very rapid way to construct and deploy complex web applications, including database driven ones; typically taking one-third to one-tenth of the time and cost compared with other alternatives. Moreover, once built, these sites are easier to maintain, extend, and evolve.

DailyFitLog’s website uses a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. The view layer is completely separated from the data layer. The application uses a cluster of 10 Mongrel instances managed by Nginx server as a production environment.