Web Travel Services Srl, a company founded by a team of entrepreneur managers who have participated with success in the founding of other companies in the tourism and the web sector.
Web Travel Services has given life to Yubuk.com, a platform which is accessible on the internet and on mobile terminals for all those who love Italy for its enchanting locations, for its excellent cuisine and exceptional hotels. Yubuk.com contains information on ten of the “coolest” locations in Italy, information which is accessible to all and to which all the users can contribute and create, modify or comment.
The ambitious objectives which the portal has taken on in terms of diffusion, growth of “community driven” contents and accessibility have created the requirement to evolve its original architecture towards a more suitable and complying model to an approach of exquisite web 2.0 type.
It is especially necessary:
To be able to conceive new and richer modes of fruition, the technological choice has also required a careful analysis of the languages and the standards of highest profile.
Starting from the initial prerequisites, the following list of technologies was opted for which together has contributed to create a true and real “mash-up application”:
It was chosen to use Google Maps to visualize, through the use of its API, the restaurants, hotels and all the locations present in the data bank of Ybuk.com. Furthermore, Ajax and Javascript functions were adopted to reduce the minimum traffic of data and download only the data relative to the portion of map visualized by the user. Through the use of the combination of Flex and Javascript technologies additional filters were made available to the user to optimize the searches on the map.
The increase of the visits to the site has brought (and will continue to bring more) an increase of traffic and load on the infrastructure web server. To avoid problems of instability or delays on the site, it was decided to separate the principle applications of the site on two different servers, Apache and PHP 5 was installed on the first, and instead MySOL is present on the second. Both applications were configured in order to obtain the best performance in relation to the load.
To improve the entire infrastructure of the site, a course or restructuring of the code was undertaken to exploit the potential offered by a powerful and famous PHP framework such as Zend. Security, reliability, modulation and integration are just some of the benefits that such a choice entails. The Zend Framework uses the latest development technology to be able to produce flexible and extendible code, using the standard design pattern for the web applications, the model-view-controller (MVC). Furthermore, in the framework, there are also functions present among which internationalization and localization, authentication, session management, search, cache and integration with external APIs.
The activities on Yubuk are up and running, with a continuous assistance for the improvement and evolution of the service. Important goals have already been achieved, measurable especially in terms of the improvement of the user experience and the ranking of the portal.
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