Highly Scalable, Internationalized Web Application - Dell Battery Replacement
Requiring a quick turnaround (3 months) and a HIGHLY scalable website (in 8 different languages), ANUJ Technologies helped
provide DELL with the solution.
The Challenge
-
Laptops with affected batteries were already in use all over the globe - in over
40 countries - in every major continent (Australia, Asia, Europe, South America,
North America). The web application would have to support various languages as well
as the different locales within a language (e.g. Canadian French, 'French'
French, Taiwanese Chinese, Traditional Chinese).
-
There were over a million affected laptop batteries - the serial numbers of
which would need to be verified across disparate databases. An elegant solution requiring
minimal database hits would be needed for handling the anticipated website traffic.
-
The number of languages and locales to be supported could grow
at any time. The
solution needed to be flexible to support new languages - which may be discovered
after deployment as well.
-
Since affected laptop batteries were already in use - and needed to be recalled
ASAP - the website had to be in production ASAP!
The Solution
High performance, scalability and resilience
were all key requirements - since the website was to receive hits from around the
globe - (several hundred thousand hits per day). ANUJ Technologies helped design
and implement a solution which included:
- Application caching of large datasets - Serial numbers that were part of static lookups were loaded once into memory and kept there - to avoid unnecessary database roundtrips.
- Server Farms - along with database based session management - to accommodate persistent sessions between different servers on the server farm
- Highly optimized web controls from Infragistics - offering sophisticated dynamic
web controls for a better end-user experience.
- Dynamic loading of individual language resources based on the user's chosen language
and locale - with the flexibility to add more languages down the road.
- Comprehensive unit tests written for each critical use case - from verifying battery
serial numbers to order placement. Fully automated build process - encompassing
entire web application including multiple language support - providing a perpetual
ready-to-release option for the web application.
The Result
| An extremely successful production launch: A high performance, scalable, .NET application which handled upto 100,000 hits hourly
and upto 2000 simultaneous user sessions. |
| An end-to-end user experience which was unmatched in both - user-friendliness as well as speed. |
| A flexible design of the high performance, scalable, eCommerce application - which allowed additional languages to be added after the production launch
- without any code changes! This helped DELL service other countries where they
later discovered they had shipments of affected laptops (e.g. Brazil, Portugal). |
|
An extremely successful returns program - implemented as a high performance, scalable, .NET web application - that served over a million affected laptop customers around the globe.
|