Case Study

Free Advertising App For Businesses

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Client

Requirement

Due to the emergence of ecommerce/mcommerce the entire world has become a single marketplace. This clearly means that every brand has to fight its competitors. For business profits, brands must not only be launched but also promoted well. Further, the brand must convince each prospect to enroll with its services over its competitors thereby increasing the marketing cost. To lower the cost of advertising, client decided to launch a free advertising platform for businesses. This application provides offers, deals directly to the customers and helps businesses to promote its products and services. Users can register themselves with their favorite business and check out the latest offers in a single dashboard. This application runs on both iOS and Android platforms and encourages user to easily register and accumulate rewards. The application includes three main users: Admin/Vendor, User and Owner. The application owner grants permission to the Admin/Vendor (businesses) to place ads for customers or users. Admin or Vendors also keep track of the user activities and accordingly place offers for the users. Vendors can restrict the validity of the offers they place and can apply desired conditions over the offer redemption. Users can access the app in two ways: through the native app registration and Facebook login. It is important to note that each login would display different offers to the users. For example, Facebook login would display Facebook-tied offers whereas an app login would display general offers probably by brands other than those reliant on Facebook. The application features one more important aspect to business promotion OR code scanning. Users can manually add offers by scanning the QR code at vendors physical location. After scanning the offer is added to users dashboard and is available publically for other application users. The application required secret counter of individual QR code scan called punch cards. This enabled vendors to record the scans made by every individual user without the user noticing it. Client expected the following: Maintaining two way user login: via registration and via Facebook Maintaining two dashboards (vendor offer dashboard and punch card dashboard) Adding feeds such as offer details, news etc. to keep users engaged Adding complex, secret counter for QR code scanning called punch cards Reading punch cards and its quick synchronization with vendor system

Project

Challenges

Team faced the following challenges: Synchronization of QR code scans with vendors application. The sync had to be quick so that the vendors could quickly send campaign or offers to users device.

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Monitoring of barcode scan and punch card calculation. Dynamically managing design fixed templates: Customer reward dashboard has a fixed template which had to be dynamically managed while adding deals.

Technologies
Operating System

Used
iOS, Android, Linux, PHP, MYSQL, Multi-Server Architecture with Staging & Production environment through Version controlling releases Load Balancer, Apache optimization, security and SSL implementation, scheduler for backups, alert monitoring system integration, server performance tuning at regular intervals, software firewall configuration and maintenance, email server configuration etc. Xcode 4.2.1, Core Data Framework, iOS SDK, MVC, Eclipse, C, Linux, PHP, MYSQL , Google API etc. SQLite, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, High Availability, Master Slave Replication, Query optimization, Slow Query Optimization, scheduler for backups, Alert Monitoring System integration, etc.

Development Environment Database

Manpower
Project Leader Developers Designers 1 2 1

Quality Assurance Testers

Planning
The following development approach was adopted to equip the site with numerous features and functionality mentioned below: Development- High level coding standards were followed to hide the complexity of the application. Google API was used to simplify the QR code scan practice.

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Simultaneously, practices were adopted for quick sync of QR codes with vendor system to get response from there. Designing the interactivity. application interaction and flow to add user-friendliness and

Syncing existing and newly available data for back-up with our database required specific attention. This helped in result generation. The user interface layer was designed for cross-platform compatibility.

Architecture
Application Life Cycle The application life cycle constitutes the sequence of events that occurs between the launch and termination of your application. In iPhone/iPad OS, the user launches the application by tapping its icon on the Home screen. Shortly after the tap occurs, the system displays some transitional graphics and proceeds to launch your application by calling its main function. From this point on, the bulk of the initialization work is handed over to UIKit which loads the applications user interface and readies its event loop. During the event loop, UIKit coordinates the delivery of events to your custom objects and responds to commands issued by your application. When the user performs an action that would cause your application to quit, UIKit notifies your application and begins the termination process. The following figure depicts the simplified life cycle of an iPhone application. This diagram shows the sequence of events that occur from the time the application starts up to the time it quits. At initialization and termination, UIKit sends specific messages to the applications delegate object to let it know what is happening. During the event loop, UIKit dispatches events to your applications custom event handlers. Figure: Application life cycle

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Event Handling Cycle

After the UI Application main function initializes the application it starts the infrastructure needed to manage the applications event and drawing cycle which is depicted in the following figure. As the user interacts with a device, iPhone/iPad OS detects touch events and places them in the applications event queue. The event-handling infrastructure of the UI Application object takes each event off the top of this queue and delivers it to the object that best suited to handle it. For example, a touch event occurring in a button would be delivered to the corresponding button object. Events can also be delivered to controller objects and other objects indirectly responsible for handling touch events in the application. Figure: The event and drawing cycle

In the iPhone OS Multi-Touch event model, touch data is encapsulated in a single event object (UI Event). To track individual touches, the event object contains touch objects (UI Touch) one for each finger that is touching the screen. As the user places fingers on the screen, moves them around and finally removes them from the screen, the system reports the changes for each finger in the corresponding touch object. When it launches an application, the system creates both a process and a single thread for that application. This initial thread becomes the applications main thread and is where the UI Application object sets up the main run loop and configures the applications event -handling code. Figure shows the relationship of the event-handling code to the main run loop. Touch events sent by the system are queued until they can be processed by the applications main run loop . Figure: Processing events in the main run loop

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The MVC Architecture is a combination of Model-View-Controller.

1. Model: The model object knows about all the data that need to be displayed. It is model who is aware about all the operations that can be applied to transform that object. It only represents the data of an application. The model represents enterprise data and the business rules that govern access to and updates of this data. Model is not aware about the presentation data and how that data will be displayed to the browser. 2. View: The view represents the presentation of the application. The view object refers to the model. It uses the query methods of the model to obtain the contents and renders it. The view is not dependent on the application logic. It remains same if there is any modification in the business logic. In other words, we can say that it is the responsibility of the view's to maintain the consistency in its presentation when the model changes. 3. Controller: Whenever the user sends a request for something then it always go through the controller. The controller is responsible for intercepting the requests from view and passes it to the model for the appropriate action. After the action has been taken on the data, the controller is responsible for directing the appropriate view to the user. In GUIs, the views and the controllers often work very closely together.

Development Highlights
This application for iPhone and Android is built around objective C and Java. The main feature of this application is QR code scanning which was implemented using Google API. Almost all the modules were developed using foundation, core graphics and UIKIT frameworks. The objective of application revolves around business promotion while presenting offers to customers. All the view controllers were linked with controller files project along with the outlets, actions of the UI element. SQLITE framework was used to maintain and store all the details locally. The site was developed and fully functional within a span of 4 months.

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