Project Overview
Buy The Reef is an online retailer in the marine ornamental fish and coral industry. When they decided to make the leap from wholesale to retail, the task of programming a state-of-the-art ecommerce store was entrusted to InspirationGate. The client needed a scalable, reliable, robust backend to support the many tasks like marketing, order tracking, and content management he wanted to accomplish with this storefront.
InspirationGate was hired to integrate and customize AspDotNetStorefront into the design provided by a third party designer. This included theme designing, programming an XML powered flash video intro page, and customizing the shopping cart’s code to better suit the customers’ needs.
Challenges
- Application responsiveness and ease of use are a key success factors in the project, so InspirationGate decided to use AspDotNetStorefront as a platform for building the solution, its high performance along with covering most of the customer requirements as well as the great extensibility model made it a great fit for the project, we believe that the decision of adopting AspDotNetStorefront as platform to implement this solution was perfect decision because it saved our customer lots of investments and made us able to deliver the solution in a reasonable time.
- BuyTheReef.com should be compatible with FireFox, Internet Explorer and Safari, the challenge here is that AspDotNetStorefront has an XSLT engine that renders the presentation layer, this platform introduced new techniques that our engineers had to master in order to be able to deliver a high quality solution.
Provided Solution
InspirationGate development team spent an adequate time reviewing all the options that can be used to implement every feature in the system inside AspDotNetStorefront, the approach was to utilize as much as possible from the existing features and minimize writing custom code, the goal we were trying to achieve is to reduce the development time/effort to the minimum.
Most of the our development activities were focused on writing XSLT files, these files are used by AspDotNetStorefront rendering engine to render the store pages, the real challenge in writing this XML is to make it compatible with required browsers, our team was also responsible to extend the functionality of the XSLT rendering engine by implementing a number of C# components and plug them in the rendering cycle.
As described in the solution architecture below, the solution was embedded inside AspDotNetStorefront and it has two main layers.
Business Logic Layer, this layer has two main components, each one of them is used to extend/configure one or more of AspDotNetStorefront components
Presentation Layer, this layer contains a component used to extend AspDotNetStorefront XSLT rendering engine and a number of pages and custom controls, both components are used to implement custom features requested by BuyTheReef.
Technologies
.Net Framework 3.5, Visual C#, SQL Server 2005 and AspDotNetStorefront ML
Customer Feedback
"I will use this company for as many projects as they will agree to take on. It was my first experience with outsourcing to somewhere outside North America and I was very very apprehensive at first. They blew my expectations out of the water. And my expectations are very high. You can be 100% secure in awarding this company your proposals. They were very up front with every step of the build and very easy to communicate with."
- Jessica Timko, President
Creative Soup