Case Study

Categories : All, Education

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Client Requirement

The client demanded a Social compass for talents to explore a dynamic and fast education community for young students to commercially aware PhD students to professors and professionals to share valuable information by creating relationships among beautiful minds. By encompassing the experts in the Academic and Business scene the website acts as a platform for valuable information sharing and gives access to the community’s collective, creative and global mindset.

Following are the features that can be used by the registered members which include: can browse almost every section of the website including news, events, messages, question and answer, contacts, recent updates, statistics, articles, create your profiles, groups, forums, view other member’s basic profiles, search and apply for jobs etc.

The system also featured:

• Student can share notes, materials, gain companies insight or seek expert advice on learning materials from top advisors as well as join or create new groups based on their academic interest or social circles. Also, the students can enroll for various courses and connect with students like themselves around the world. For higher education professionals the website will help them promote the programs and courses to increase the student enrollment.
• Designing the collaborative relationships of faculty and students interactions to make the most of their experiences.
• Strengthen the professional connections and help them build their professional networks of colleges, universities etc. thus helping in their career growth.

Project Challenges

Team faced the following challenges:

• Developing a robust framework for the site which is capable of managing millions of users at the same time without slowing the site down.
• Ensuring easy navigation through the implementation of web usability principles in the website design.
• Synchronizing the integrated features like articles, messages, statistics and more while being executed simultaneously.
• Enabling the site to operate a,t top speed even in peak traffic hours and maintaining good load balance.
• Ensuring safe and secure transfer of data.

Technologies Used

Manpower

Planning

The enormous structure of the website and the challenges involved necessitated the adoption of a four-tier approach that consisted of:

• MYSQL Server Database, Tables, Stored Procedures etc… incorporated within the Database layer.
• Conversion of data between incompatible type systems in databases and accessing data from the database for the Interface layer and Database Abstraction layer respectively.
• All the business logic procedures for various modules formed the Business Logic layer.
• The GUI of the website formed the User Interface layer.

Architecture

The website was mainly characterized by rich user data and featured extensive capabilities of social networking nature which entailed MySQL Server and Symfony. The development structure was specifically implemented to facilitate the ‘faster to market’ transition of such concepts. Effective access to the database in an object oriented context was implemented using an interface translating the object logic to relational logic so as to communicate with the relational databases in an object-oriented manner.

The access to the database was enabled through the creation of an intermediary abstraction layer. Only the complex retrieval of data from multiple tables was facilitated through stored procedures and everywhere else conditional syntax was implemented to ensure seamless performance of the website. Images, applications and data were called from their respective servers keeping the UI layer free of any business logic.

Development Highlights

The entire framework was kept highly scalable in order to provide adaptability & ease while incorporating new features. Extensive pre-development research was carried out to create a robust application with extensive customizations in minimum time frame. Web usability guidelines were strictly adhered during the development and the interface was made easily navigable through the judicious use of CSS, AJAX and HTML controls. The site was developed and fully functional within a span of 6 months.