Projects

We have the expertise of building and deploying over one hundred web applications using different MVC frameworks like Symfony, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Zend, Struts, Spring and .NET. We have extensively used one or more JavaScript and AJAX toolkits like ExtJS, Scriptaculous, Prototype, Dojo, JQuery, YUI and MooTools to bring richness and responsiveness to the UI. Most of our web applications are powered by MySQL database. We have also used SQL Server, Oracle and Postgre as the database. We have also used Lucene and Google's BigTable in our projects where there is a lot of unstructured and text data. These web applications are hosted in shared, dedicated and virtually dedicated environments. We have also used Amazon EC2, Flexiscale and Google. Here are the details of some of our projects:

Re-engineering Business Support Systems for a Residential ADSL Provider in UK

The client was a major broadband provider in UK having more than 200,000 customers. Their current legacy system was built in-house 10 years ago and evolved over the years. The system could no longer adapt easily to accommodate new requirements. As a result, launching new products and reacting to competition and market conditions became a slow process. Even minor changes became tedious to implement due to the level of testing involved.

We provided resources to work with the customer's development team to undertake a major re-engineering effort. The team decided to go for API-driven subsystems. Subsystems would communicate with each other through APIs. Legacy subsystems were wrapped under APIs to effect a smooth transition. A new MVC framework was created so that development is streamlined. Permissions were managed within the framework so that developers don't have to worry about that. Technologies used include PHP 5, custom MVC and ORM frameworks, JQuery and MySQL.

Search Engine and Document Delivery System

This site delivers over 10 million page views per month and has an Alexa worldwide ranking of 1600. This site started operations in 2004 and reached #1 spot in their domain. This website primarily provides documents on specific subjects. There are more than 50 million documents stored in a MySQL database. 'Read-only' replicas of this database allow distribution of load between multiple servers. This site has a powerful full-text search feature built on top of the open-source Lucene search engine. The documents in the database are indexed using Lucene's indexer and stored in multiple index shards. Each shard or fragment is of a manageable size. Searches are parallelized and handled by around 10 search servers, each server handling a portion of the index. The results are merged, ranked and served by the web servers. System architecture is similar to Google.

The site developed using PHP, Symfony, Java, iBatis, Lucene and MySQL offers features like saved searches, search-term alerts and portfolios. The site is also search-engine friendly with all 50 million documents in the site being spidered and indexed by Google. Multiple web and search servers, and read-only replicas of the MySQL database enables load balancing and high-availability of the site.

The data assets are monetized through Google Ad Sense and a document delivery system for paying customers.

Operational Support Systems for a Wireless Broadband Services Provider

We built an Operational Support System (OSS) for a high-speed wireless broadband service provider in UK. The client who started their operations in 2006 wanted to build a custom OSS to automate their operations. We are in the process of incrementally building this system. We have already created an intranet and customer portal. The customer portal presently has a help desk (ticketing system), knowledge base and live chat. Support Suite from Kayako was seamlessly integrated with the portal. The intranet presently has a team directory, discussion forum (phpBB) and wiki (mediawiki). Salesforce is used for tracking leads and opportunities, and Google apps is used for calendaring, managing meetings and email. We have integrated SalesForce and Google Apps with the intranet. Users are provisioned from a single point so that the admin does not have to go to the admin panel of each application. Also, when the end-user signs in to intranet, they are logged into all other apps due to single-sign-on. We have now started building and integrating modules for traffic and network management.

Business Process Management / Workflow Application

A Business Process Management application was built for a billion dollar multinational asset Management Company which has branches in Chicago, New York, Denver and India. They have financial advisers and partners throughout the United States. Each of their locations perform specific functions. Denver is responsible for trading, Chicago for customer service and New York for portfolio management. The branches have to operate in concert to complete a business process like opening a new account or rebalancing a portfolio. An account opening process would involve actors at multiple locations - the financial adviser would fax in the account opening form, Chicago will process the form and initiate money transfer, New York will decide what assets to keep and what to sell, Denver would trade based on instructions by the asset manager and India would do the reconciliation and generate statements. Instructions were exchanged between offices over fax or phone, since email was insecure due to the sensitive nature of the data.

Personnel, Equipment and Vendor Management Systems for US based Construction Company

This project was done for a multi million dollar construction company based in USA, having thousands of employees and contractors. Headquartered in CA, they specialize in heavy, highway and civil engineering construction. We built a system for them to keep track of hourly rates, worker skill level and training, accidents, disability and insurance information, work and worker locations and equipment usage and rentals.

We developed the system using Spring, Hibernate, Oracle database and Dojo for automating the personnel-management related requirements. The key feature of this system is that there is only one page making it very efficient since all the information about an employee or contractor is accessible from the same page, thereby improving the efficiency of supervisors.. AJAX calls are used to update different sections of the page. This system also interfaces with the other enterprise systems like Dispatch, Accounting and Payroll.

Testing Services for US based Widget Platform Company

The USA based client has the most widely used widget platform in the Internet in terms of the number of widgets served. Their platform allows widget developers to create, distribute, share, track and monetize Internet widgets. Widgets can be built using Flash, images or HTML/JavaScript. The platform allows the widget developer to deploy their widgets into a number of popular social networking sites (FaceBook/MySpace/Hi5) and widget galleries like iGoogle. The number of permutations that needed testing is very high given that the customer needs cross-browser compatibility.

We were engaged to do QA for the widget platform. Due to the fast paced environment, releases were made frequently and at least once in 2 weeks. This made testing a challenge since there isn't much time to manually test every combination. So we started working towards automation of tests. We have finished automating all the smoke tests, so we can quickly find any major problems. We have now started automating the entire set of regression test cases. Once that is complete, regression can be done in a matter of hours instead of days. This will give developers faster feedback and will further shorten the development cycle. Most of the test cases were automated using the Selenium framework. However, Selenium cannot automate Flash application testing and this is a problem that we are now trying to solve.

Voice Help Assistant

This application was developed using Flash and AJAX to provide voice enabled help for web applications. An avatar walks the user through each page and its controls. User could choose their favorite Avatar and voice. A speech engine developed using AT&T Bell Labs converts help text to voice. Help text can be entered by the admin for each page and control which is stored in XML format. The active webpage/control is tracked by Javascript on the client side. It then requests a help item. The speech engine converts the text of the help item to voice and streams it to the Flash client on the user's page.

International Private Flight Booking Website

We have developed a website that allows luxury travelers to book private jets online. The site is owned by a former Royal Air Force Pilot. Many private aircraft operators and charter companies in Europe have registered and offer their services through the site. The system has data about almost all the airfields and even the small runways in Europe. The system is integrated with Google Earth and Maps, and was developed in J2EE using Spring, MySQL, AJAX and iBatis.

Please also check out our Drupal Projects to see details of our projects using Drupal as content management system.