SteelOrbis Events – Case study

Introduction

SteelOrbis, one of the greatest companies on the Turkish steel market, deals with organisation of meetings and conferences on international and domestic markets. The Internet was chosen as the main way of contact with client because of its user friendliness and numerous possibilities. In order to achieve the highest level of ergonomy and website security, it was decided to design a dedicated Internet application written in Java.

Analysis

We conducted a needs analysis and competitive solutions analysis for our client so as to define exactly what product we had to create. The research proved the Internet application would be displayed on computers with the resolution of 1024x768 and more, with the use of Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers. The capacity of the application was estimated at the level of 5 – 20 simultaneous connections.

The following functionalities were required:

• - Language version choice in which the website would be displayed
• - Search through information about coming, ongoing and previous events organised by SteelOrbis,
• - Search through the information about SteelOrbis,
• - Registration as a participant in particular events,
• - Possibility to leave an email address where the information about new contents would be sent,
• - Credit card payment for services provided by SteelOrbis

The product is to enable authorised employees managing information about events and the SteelOrbis company from the level of Internet browser and supporting the online registration service. The interface of the administrative panel should be designed in such a way that there is no need to have IT knowledge to manage the contents of the website.

Solution

The environment and architecture of the application was developed on the basis of the predefined guidelines. It was agreed that it would work on a virtual machine compatible with Java 1.4.2, on the Tomcat 5 server and the IBM DB2 database. The Hibernate and Spring frameworks were chosen to service the data transfer to the database because a combination of the two solutions provides high level of system security and stability. The Acegi Security module was implemented and when developing the user interface we decided to use the Tapestry framework. The proposal to use worldwide used and appreciated technologies was approved by our client.

It took 90 days to prepare the order, counting from the first modification to the shop opening. This stage was preceded with over a seven day period of analysing and defining the guidelines. The client had the possibility to follow the work progress throughout the project realisation and any remarks were taken into consideration on a current basis.

After two months from the needs analysis approval we presented the client with the initial version of the application which enabled us to adjust the final product to our client’s expectations in an even better way. The application was launched within less than six months after the contract had been signed.

See the application at www.steelorbisevents.com or download the information brochure in PDF format.