What Runs Your Start-up - MaistorPlus
MaistorPlus solves the common problem of finding a reliable builder or handyman. An online platform that brings master craftsmen and homeowners together.
The process is really easy. Homeowners post jobs on the website and receive offers from relevant tradesmen. After the job is done homeowners leave feedback and recommendations. With this feature homeowners can compare tradesmen profiles, offers and ratings and confidently choose who they want to hire.
The team is also runner up at the Start IT Smart 3Challenge. Boris Sanchez shared their technical mojo.
Main Technologies
Main technologies used are PHP, Symfony 2.1 and PostgreSQL.
MaistorPlus is a traditional web platform developed with the Symfony framework. Web pages are rendered by Twig - a straightforward, flexible and easy to extend templating engine, which is integrated into the Symfony framework by default and works server-side with PHP in order to generate dynamic content, based on data stored in the database. Web pages also use jQuery and Sizzle.js and feature modern graphics. Everything is beautifully styled with CSS.
Why Not Something Else
The original development team already had experience with Symfony, Zend, Spring and some other web application development frameworks. We opted for Symfony for two main reasons. First, Symfony is constantly improving, and has a strong and continuously growing community that offers 3rd party add-on components for free. Second, PHP is a bit easier to "learn as you go" then Java. The members of our design team didn't have a lot of prior programming experience, so we wanted to make sure we set a low barrier of entry for them, as we didn't have the enough development staff to have a distinct separation between design creation and design integration in our team.
For the initial prototype we used the MySQL database management system. After a while we wanted to add spatial features to the business logic, and discovered that MySQL does not have proper support for spatial indexing. We therefore decided to migrate to PostgreSQL, which supports spatial data with add-ons like PostGIS.
Boris Sanchez
Want More Info?
MaistorPlus is going to organize a Beta Testing next month. You are welcome to subscribe to their monthly newsletter or follow them on Facebook / Twitter.
If you’d like to hear more from MaistorPlus please comment below. I will ask them to follow this thread and reply to your questions.
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What Runs Your Start-up - Ucha.se
Ucha.se makes learning fun. It is an online platform, on which pupils and students learn and prepare for school. Pupils learn faster, improve their results and get inspired. The platform allows students to watch videos, take tests, ask questions and share comments. Learning is represented with gamification components like drawings, playful narration, dashboards with the best students, etc. It is available on the web and is extending to mobile. Ucha.se is well recognized by the parents and teachers in Bulgaria. In November 2012 Ucha.se was awarded as the best website in Bulgaria in the field of Education and Science.
Nikolay Zheynov is leading the IT team which maintains and expands the web platform. He shared with me some of the internals.
Main Technologies
Main technologies used are PHP, MySQL, Nginx, jQuery and jQueryUI.
Server-side development is done with PHP 5. The main reason for choosing PHP is that the IT team working on the platform had long experience with the language. Ucha.se has developed their own PHP framework which is constantly expanding. This allows flexible programming and easier application maintenance. Nginx is the web server of choice.
MySQL 5 is used for the database because PHP + MySQL is like bread and butter. While the site usage was growing the team had to optimize their DB layer and switched from MyISAM storage engine to InnoDB.
On the client-side standard web technologies are used - HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The main goal when doing the website design was to match expectation from different user groups - pupils, teachers, parents and students. jQuery and jQueryUI are widely used on the client side.
Why Not Something Else?
True to our agile approach to incrementally enhance the product and the technology that goes along with it, we strongly believe in the scaling on demand practices. Ucha.se's own framework reflects exactly to that. It allows us to meet our growing user demands and provides at the same time, the dev-team with enough flexibility to quickly react on new business opportunities and technological (r)evolutions.
Nikolay Zheynov
Want More Info?
If you’d like to hear more from Ucha.se please comment below. I will ask them to follow this thread and reply to your questions.
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