Case Study Social Platform to Manage Financial Aspects
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Client
Requirement
Client is a web application which will provide a financial platform w ith a mission to incentivize financial responsibility through Education (Library), Competition (Rankings) and Reward (accumulation of points to certain levels = rewards). Specifically, w ith the help of this application the user gets a financial-social platform to be connected with each other; share and get solutions over their f inancial problems and get rewards by managing their f inancial statements. Financial Service providers can provide their details in the resources section so that user can find and avail these local financial service provider’s services. Users can provide their own review regarding these financial service providers. Client is a financial web platform for the individuals to manage their f inancial aspect. Client provide platform w here users can generate various reports to analyze their income and expense. Once user provides various inputs they are able to generate value creation component. Platform provides various competitive, compass reading and other reward summary to motivate users to participate on platform. Client is basically divided into community and finance section. Community section has elements like building associates, board members; invite friends, discussion in boardroom and water-cooler, FSP resources, libraries and test . Community section is free to access for all users. Finance section has finance inputting (Income inputs, Cash flow inputs and Balance Sheet inputs), reports (Monthly & Annual Income Statement, Monthly & Annual Balance Sheet, Monthly & Annual Cash flow Statement), vitals. Vitals provide various value creation or competitive data. Vital sections have competitive ranking, compass reading, reward summary, income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet statement competitive and ranking information. Compass reading provide value creation since inception and for last 30 days. Client provide access to value creation component either via earning reward points or via payin g one time or recurring subscription. There is a FSP section for f inancial service provider to advertise their service offering. FSP can register and manage their account. FSP can subscribe for various paid activities like featured listing, priority listing and advance profile.
Project
Challenges
The team faced the following challe nges: -
Incorporating web usability principles while developing numerous features designed for enhancing the users’ experience.
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Security of user’s finance data is the key challenge of the platform.
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Finance inputting is the biggest challenge of the platform. System has to provide user’s ability to input very huge data in excel type of grid. There are more than 1000 inputs per finance inputs.
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For finance inputs there are many background inter-connected calculations to generate Income, Balance Sheet and Cash flow reports.
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Consistency across input data and report generation is the key challenging area.
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There is very high level of complexity for the finance calculation.
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Ensuring more complex relation between data and their consistency. Each entity or information is being used in various places in conjunction with other information. Showing the most relevant information at various places by clear way of presentation is the main challenge as almost all the information is similar to the different entities.
Technologies Used Ope rating System & Server Management
Development Tools & Environments Database
Red Hat Linux OS, Multi-Server Architecture with Staging & Production Environment through Version Controlling releases, Server Optimization, Security & SSL Implementation, Scheduler for Back-ups, Alert Monitoring System Integration, Server Performance Tuning at regular intervals, Software Firewall Configuration & Maintenance PHP5+, Microsoft Visio, Zend Studio, Symfony Framework, SVN, AJAX, CSS, JavaScript, HTML etc. MYSQL Database Server, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, Master Slave Replication, Query Optimization, Scheduler for Backups
Manpower
Project Leade r
1
Developers
5
Designers
2
Quality Assurance Testers
1
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Planning The following four-tier development approach was adopted to equip the site with nume rous features and functionality me ntioned before: The Database layer containing MYSQL Server Database, Tables, Triggers and so on. The Data Access layer containing the Data Access DLL responsible for accessing data from the database. The Business Logic layer consisting of all the business logic procedures for varied modules. The User Interface layer which forms the Graphical User Interface of the website .
Architecture N-tier architecture was adopted to efficiently meet the needs of the enormous application. Follow ing are the layers involved which are loosely coupled w ith each other:
User Inte rface Laye r: This w ill include the page level layer w hich w ill be accessing the other layers beneath to present the data.
Business Specific Layer: This acts as a bridge between the User Interface layer and Database layer. This will contain all the business logic for the different components involved in the project.
Database Specific Layer: This acts as a bridge between the physical database and the business logic accessing the data.
Physical Database Layer: This includes MYSQL with the tables, views, stored procedures etc.
Development
Highlights
The design approach was built around PHP 5 and MY SQL SERVER 5 due to the financial nature of the application. In order to most effectively access the database in an object-oriented context, an interface translating the object logic to the relational logic was used to communic ate with the relational databases in an object-oriented manner. An intermediary abstraction layer was created for accessing data from the database. Triggers, Stored Procedure and Custom MYSQL functions were used only for complex calculation of data from multiple tables and were utilized heavily with the conditional syntax to ensure smooth performance of the website. The UI layer was kept free of any business logic with images, applications and data being called from their respective servers. Web usability guidelines were strictly followed during development and the interface was made easily navigable through the judic ious use of AJAX, CSS3 and HTML5 controls. The application was developed and fully functional within a span of 7 months.
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