Voyavo is an application developed with latest web2.0 technology and cutting-edge user interface. Highly interactive and having all the social interaction features - Voyavo is just the right tool for all the travel enthusiasts for planning their trips. Apart from making trip management a piece of cake, Voyavo also helps you find the best and book flights, hotels, car hire and activities and you can easily add them to your itinerary.

Voyavo brings a more social travel experience with the ability to share proposed itineraries, watch for the best priced items, store travel bookings, and quickly develop a travel plan – to meet the needs of all travelers on a trip, before your book the travel details. Voyavo harness social networks and helps consumers to organize, share details and invite others to join in travel planning and search, book, post and share activities with friends, family and associates.

All of your restaurant reservations, day activities, flights, hotel stays and other details from your trip can be kept together and organized by day, and by week. Voyavo has a seamless integration with maps and you can even view your trip details in relation to each other - get directions to and from all your planned events. With a number of privacy options, you decide who can view what. Keep your own itinerary separate from everyone else. For group trips, you can keep a separate itinerary that is private from the rest of the group. You can also create other organizers to help plan the trip. You can also create a watchlist of fares & prices - Voyavo keeps track and notifies you of the best deals and prices of flights, hotels, and cars you add to your watchlist.

You can login with any of your social network or email accounts - connect to Voyavo with your MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL/AIM, Gmail, OpenID, or Twitter account! You don’t need to create another set of login information you might forget! Invite your friends from Facebook and your address books to easily keep everyone up-to-date on travel plans.

Voyavo is developed using Symfony and JQuery - the latest in web technology. Symfony is a php-based framework designed on the principles such as DRY and KISS. It is the perfect tool for developing feature rich complex web applications such as Voyavo. It is also highly customizable with a wide range of plugins and an active community. JQuery is one of the most feature rich and customizable javascript library. It accelerates development to a great extent and helps you deliver a highly enhanced GUI to the users. Again, with a wide variety of plugins available, you can create a state-of-the-art interface to impress your consumers.

Choosing the right tools for development of a product is an essential part of its success. We at Mobicules understand this and recommend the best solutions from the industry.  The Internet is ever-changing and ever-expanding and so are the applications.

Symfony is a great framework to build sophisticated, maintainable, extendable and scalable applications using php. Following the MVC paradigm, it keeps code maintainable, and heavily minimizes the number of repetitive tasks that need to be performed while building and maintaining the application.

Goal

To select a platform/framework which will allow scaling to 10s of million users for a social application.

The core issue here is Database Scalability and Flexibility. We’ll touch upon both one by one:

Database Scalability: As it turns out, perfectly normalized, flat databases with absolutely no data/information duplication are not essentially right for applications that need to scale to a huge user base. Such a database structure needs excessive computation and a lot of table joins, which end up getting computationally very expensive as user base grows.

Database Flexibility: Complete control over database structure is required if one is to design an application that is needed to scale to a huge user base, as with time, different clustering and partitioning schemes might be required to help the application scale horizontally.

Platform Assessment

The following is an assessment of Elgg, Drupal and Symfony on the above parameters:

ELGG: Due to a very flat and normalized database structure, the only way to scale horizontally with ELGG is to duplicate the database using MySQL replication on multiple servers. The negative with this approach is that it ends up duplicating the complete database, with the result that each machine running a copy of the replicated database will have to be very powerful server, rendering the solution expensive. (MySQL clusters is a standard way of doing it)

Drupal: Similar problems as ELGG with Drupal, but database is not as flat and normalized as ELGG. Scaling up in a similar manner as described for ELGG wity MySQL clusters would probably be cheaper with Drupal.

Symfony: Allows us to use a custom database structure. We can design the database and replicate it as we like. Symfony also uses its own query/object caching mechanism, which is efficient. As an example, the Yahoo bookmarks site supports 20 million users on Symfony.

Proposed Solutions

Solution 1:
Get deep into the ELGG code and customize the database interaction layer so as to support our own database, that can be designed and partitioned as we wish. The problem that this approach comes bundled with is that subsequent ELGG updates/releases will not be directly usable by us, and we will have to manually merge them into our ‘custom ELGG’. The positive of this approach is that ELGG plugins will work on our ‘custom ELGG’ with none or very little changes, if any.

Solution 2:
Build the solution ground up with Symfony, with our own custom database design that allows us the flexibility to partition it as we like. 

Recommendation

Our recommendation in a case where you are looking to scale up to 10s of millions of users would be write everything from scratch (and not use a ‘platform’ like ELGG/Drupal), that allows you to customize and tweak anything and everything. Symfony seems to have a good reputation for enabling creation of very large websites, and so, we would recommend using Symfony as a framework.

With this experience in the background, Mobicules is now capable of designing, developing, deploying and maintaining rich kiosk multimedia applications and kiosk management infrastructure.

Introduction to ELGG, the Open Source Social Network Platform

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: barcampdelhi barcampdelhi5)

We have been doing Facebook Application Development for quite some time now, and many of our clients come in with queries about how to best monetize on Facebook. The presentation above might throw some light on answers to that question.

What that would mean is that a website which was not social until now, would suddenly come alive, with the user’s Facebook Social Graph being instantly available on the website. It looks like a lot of privileges available to Facebook Application Developers till now would now also be available to stand-alone websites.

 We think this is a very sensible balance between
    (a) Developing a stand-alone website, attracting users, getting them to invite friends and get them all engaged, and
    (b)Developing an app for Facebook that can use Facebook’s features and data, but now has no independent presence.This is going to make a lot of sense to a lot of people.

We’re eager to start working with our clients on this.

How does one convert an existing website to a Social Container? Thats an important question to ask, and as it turns out, its not really too difficult. But before we get into that, it is important to understand a few things about the Google development platform in general.

Google has had, since long before OpenSocial, a widget platform that supports widgets called Google Gadgets. Google Gadgets API enables hosting of widgets on the iGoogle page, and provides APIs to access data from various Google Services like Google Maps. What OpenSocial does is, it extends the list of APIs to introduce APIs that make social data from a social container available to a social application.

Due to the reasons above, Implementing an OpenSocial Container broadly requires implementing the following two components:
1. Gadget Server providing the Gadgets API - The Gadget Server implements the Javascript Gadget API which allows Google Gadgets to be hosted and run on the Website

2. SocialData Server providing the RESTful APIs for servicing the requests from OpenSocial Gadgets (Social Applications) - The SocialData server would connect with the website’s server at the back-end, and provide implementations of the RESful APIs to be used by the Social Applications.

As it turns out, doing the above is not excruciatingly complicated really. Shindig comes to your rescue here. Shindig is an open-source implementation of the Gadgets Server and the OpenSocial API. Once you have Shindig running on your server and plug with your website, your website will be able to host Google Gadgets, and service OpenSocial API calls. You’ll have to plug in the implementation of the APIs with your websites’s back-end database to enable the APIs to access the data.

So there! Make your website an OpenSocial applications host, and engage your users with new and interesting functionality.

Dialog Boxes are a very good way of taking user input, validating it, and submitting it to the server without having the user navigate away from the page where he performed the action that opened up the Dialog Box. This keeps navigation, simple, compact and very very intuitive. Have a look at the use of Dialog Boxes we’ve made in iAspire. We use Dialog Boxes for almost all user actions where the user needs to enter any additional input after having taken the action.

We recently had a requirement from one of our clients to build a fairly complex dialog box that was a complete menu system that would allow the user to navigate a list of objects arranged as a tree, read details about them which would pop up in boxes inside the Dialog Box, and finally, purchase or add one of them to some sort of a cart. We thought it would be just about impossible to do it with a Facebook Dialog Box, but thought we should try a few it out. And know what, its all possible from inside a Dialog Box!

We’ll post the link to the application when we have released it, and a few tips/caveats/gotchas too. Till then, have a look at the documentation .