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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