Powerful Content Distribution Platform

Fully featured e-commerce module for secure content purchase
Splendid commenting, ratings and messaging options
High system performance thanks to the implemented load distribution algorithms

Expertise

Web & Enterprise Portals

Verticals

Media & Entertainment

Comprehensive and load-resistant web platform gathering digital content sellers and buyers in the single space.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Results

Context

Our customer — a well-established IT consulting company AtBizz — came up with an idea of a system that would enable users to upload their personal media files to the website, so that other people could purchase them. The system was expected to generate previews and support all of the commonly used media types including the latest video codecs, audio formats and images. The Customer laid a special emphasis on the security features implementation along with the check of unauthorized distribution of copyrighted content, and anti-virus protection should have been also taken into consideration.

The goal of the website was to be the "ebay" of digital knowledge and virtual products, making it easy for everybody to be able to earn money with what they’ve created or produced online.

Solution

The website is a unique social media network that allows users to collaborate, create, and sell securely digital content including video, music, documents, tutorials, and programs.

The system combines community features with e-commerce functionality. Product management, user administration, secure payment processing, a commission system, advanced content management represent the e-commerce part. Commenting and ratings options and a built-in messaging system embody the community part.

Another feature of this project was that the Customer worked as a part of the development team both remotely and onsite for almost a year.

Development Process

The actual collaboration with Iflexion started from the development stage. The Customer spent the first two months of this phase at our office being part of the development team and was involved into the architectural and decisive processes. After that, the two teams started working remotely, having supported remote collaboration with a version control system, automated builds, and deployments.

We made the website accessible on a wide range of platforms and browsers and compatible with the latest W3C recommendations and current web standards.

During the final stage of the development the Customer visited us once again, which gave us additional benefits and helped easily discuss and adopt last minute changes.

Technologies

Iflexion created a distributed application that consists of a website, a set of ISAPI extensions (Internet Server API), a media encoder windows service and in-memory caching Windows service.

The Microsoft .NET framework was used as the main technology platform for this system, particularly ASP.NET supported by MySQL database and a third-party database layer generator (LLBLGen). This significantly decreased the development time and the amount of bugs found in the system. The media encoder server was implemented through a fast multithreading approach, which supports most of the latest hardware features available at the time of the project development.

The support of the upload/download of large files was implemented via the Flash technology on the client side and ISAPI plus ASP.NET on the server side.