Newitech partnered with an American web development firm and software architect to build a business intelligence product for professional marketers in the destination marketing industry.

Organization

Founded in 1999, Portland Webworks is one of northern New England's premier web development firms featuring such diverse clients as Lockheed Martin and the Maine Office of Tourism for which it was nominated for a 2005 Webby Award. To diversify revenue streams and to provide clients with higher quality Internet tools, in 2005 it began to invest in and market a few software products and start-up ventures.

Between 2001 and 2006, Idea Bridging, a consulting network of free-lancers operated by Andrew Gauvin, provided business strategy, IT architecture and project management services to clients launching e-businesses, new e-services, and new software products.

Problem

After multiple years working closely with large clients and their professional advertisers, Portland Webworks concluded that there was a need for a tool to provide professional marketers with cross-channel strategic information to make decisions.

They could create a truly differentiated product by leveraging the usability and reporting capabilities of Web 2.0 AJAX functionality, and could tailor the product around their experience in the destination marketing industry. The idea was to develop a product that could show trended conversion information for marketing efforts.

Portland Webworks contracted with Idea Bridging to provide project management and IT strategy services. Together Portland Webworks and Idea Bridging performed market research, needs analysis, estimation, and project planning.

Portland Webworks needed to assemble an engineering team to design and implement the prototype, and then work with an expanded internal team to prepare the final release.

Solution

Newitech joined the team to help define architectural components. Newitech leveraged its team's experience with JasperReports and Crystal Reports and assessed emerging reporting tools such as BIRT and JFreeReports.  It then prepared a rapid proof-of-concept using Jasper Reports. The same exercise was repeated with open source business intelligence tools, with an assessment of Jasper Server and Pentaho prepared along with a proof-of-concept deployment of Jasper Server.

For the first client-facing prototype, Newitech developed a data entry and reporting framework. It extended proven J2EE frameworks to rapidly prepare the model, service, and data entry tiers of the application. Newitech applied generics, Struts, Spring, and Hibernate to provide a modern, elegant solution. The reporting framework featured innovative techniques for dynamically generating JasperReports and JFreeCharts as well as integrating with Flash chart components from FusionCharts and their XML API. Top user interface designers from Portland Webworks collaborated with the team to provide a clean, professional look and feel for this prototype.

Portland Webworks finalized the reporting requirements, choosing a reporting interface inspired by Google Analytics and a reporting framework inspired by JasperReports that would allow for creating report definitions online by a business analyst.  Newitech, together with a newly hired dedicated J2EE engineer from Portland Webworks, developed the final product. With a two-month development cycle available to prepare the final phase one product, Portland Webworks focused on developing an ETL (extraction transformation load) and data-warehouse framework and integrating with various live data sources. Newitech focused on developing the back-end analytics framework, the interactive AJAX-Flash user interfaces, and the data management interfaces.  Idea Bridging and Newitech proposed the design of the final reporting framework:  a web-focused, flexible XML service oriented architecture that would simply use off-the-shelf JavaScript, Java, and Flash components and toolkits to provide the sophisticated analytics interfaces. Newitech quickly refactored the original prototype application. The joint team developed final solution in a series of three-week iterative development phases.

Results

Partnering with Newitech helped Portland Webworks to design, build, and deploy a cutting-edge business intelligence platform in a little over two months. The teams were focused and responsibilities were coordinated: account management, user interface design, graphic design, system architecture, ETL application development, data management and third-party integration was performed by PWW. Newitech was mandated with and delivered the flexible, elegant J2EE core application as well as the fluid AJAX user experience of the user interface.

Newitech set a solid example for professional J2EE development by implementing well-documented, professionally structured code complete with unit tests. The service-oriented design enabled a paced iterative development approach that has served as solid foundation for future enhancements.

The distributed team had developed, tested, and deployed an integrated system to client's new production environment, populated with data, data feeds activated. With an additional two months available for a second phase of development, Portland Webworks was able to expand their in-house team and finalize the project for its first client and prepare the Marketing Intelligence Platform product for market.

Key Technologies

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Jboss 4.x
• MySQL 5.0
• Java APIs and Tools: Swing, Struts, Tiles, Hibernate 3
• Interactive AJAX functionality leveraging Prototype and script.aculo.us Javascript frameworks
• Additional interactive functionality by using Flash with FusionCharts v3 reporting components
• Key Tools: Eclipse, CVS, Mantis, JSPWiki, Skype