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Case Study - TripOnADeal
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Sand developed a comprehensive Social Networking site aimed for travelers with features including Epicfu's social network and Streaming Video Technology. Scalability is a major criteria which has been taken care very efficiently.

The Client
TRIP ON A DEAL is a weekly webcast featuring unique vacation ideas and hard to beat travel deals across the web.Informative, fun and loaded with bargains, destinations and entertainment ... all in just five minutes a week! Whew! We also have a vibrant community of travelers who share their stories, videos and photos with each other and contribute to our show. Plus great deals on travel gear for our members in our online store. TriponaDeal.com can be found on iPod, mobile phone and even television through services like TVTonic. and Apple TV. They also have a presence on most video hosting sites like YouTube, video aggregators like iTunes and Miro, and social networks like Facebook. Or get it how you want it through our RSS feed.

The show is hosted by Luz Montez and John Palacio, both award-winning television journalists. Luz is an Emmy-winning producer with over two decades experience at ABC News. John has produced and directed broadcasts from war zones for "Good Morning America" and from award shows for "Entertainment Tonight" and "The Insider" Viewers of Good Morning America Sunday know John as a feature correspondent, reporting from across America. And Now Productions is a New York-based new media broadcast network, developing entertaining, timely, informational shows delivered when and where you want them. And Now Productions is a division of Dirt Alert,Inc (tm).

The Challenge
Whne John, founder of TripOnADeal first talked with us, we were reluctant as to if we can complete this project as he is envisioning the site. The site needed to have extensive features with robustness and scalability. But with his support we were able to develop a huge site. Below are a list of challenges on the site:

Summary of challenges:

• A comprehensive Social Network, where feature on EpicFu need to be recreated. We had this challenge of using EpicFu or to recreate a custom solution. We opted to build a custom solution as it gives us full flexibility for us to add/modify any feature. This was a risky and a tough decision for us as we had to re-create an entire platform..
• A lot of Videos will be on the site, Quality of the video should not be compromised to make them stream faster. If the quality of the video is decreased, file size of the video decreases and streams faster.
• Website need to be robust and most importantly scalable as more users will be trying to access the site.o

The Solution
Developing such large application was a real challenge for us at Sand. The major part was to create a comprehensive and a robust Social Network and the other was the video streaming & quality of the video. Latest FLV tools are used for the video to stream better. We had to test several resolutions before the correct size, good quality and optimum streaming to be achieved.

To make the site robust and handle scalability we developed the site from scratch using a 3-tier MVC Architecture (Model View Controller) to increase scalability & maintainability. We also followed AGILE Development Methodology, BugZilla, SVN to execute the project in a more efficient way.

The BottomLine
TripOnADeal has been a great site with loads of features. It has been a real challenge for us, we are content that we were able to develop such huge site successfully. We are currently working on improving the site further with more improvements on videos, community for fans and several other features.

Sand understood that designing & developing a new concept into reality called for a departure from conventional web design methods and start thinking out-of-the-box.

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