Couch call

Being passionate rugby fans, our Australian clients approached us with the idea to create an application for rugby match spectators at home. The original concept was to integrate live text commentary with social features, enabling users to comment, vote and share their opinion on every match event. That way rugby fans, who prefer to stay at home and watch live broadcasts, could interact and feel as if they were in a stadium. The clients had disappointing experience with their previous software development contractor, who failed to deliver results within the 2 months period. So we were required to deliver results within stringent time frames.

Magora System’s team tackled this project with passion, as the novel app idea and challenging requirements heated up the atmosphere. To launch the project on time we had ten highly experienced developers working concurrently. With rugby matches being so popular in Australia, the most strenuous task was to make the system withstand high load – up to 200,000 requests per minute. To allow for scalability, we used clustering on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Our team conducted careful experimenting and testing with Apache Jmeter to make sure the application doesn’t lose performance, as the traffic flow increases.

After 4 weeks of work we outperformed ourselves and delivered even more, than had been originally expected: web service with CMS, iOS and Android applications. This way we enable any spectator, be it a smart phone user or a PC fan, to be a part of the game and cheer socially for their team.

Technology used: Web: PHP, Yii, Bootstrap, Eoauth, MongoYii, YiiMailer; PHP - mongo-client and GD, Volley, PullToRefresh. Server: Java, MongoDB, Apache Velocity, Hibernate Validator, Jersey (RESTful Web Service Framework), Jetty (Servlet container). iOS: native iOS SDK, Cocoa Touch framework, RestKit framework, MPTransition library for voting animations.