Case Study | FHL | App Development

Client

Facial Hair League

Year

2017

A leading media company bringing together Facial Hair clubs and enthusiasts focused on raising money for non-profit organizations.

Target customers are men, women and kids who love expressing themselves with that which grows on the face.

Problem Statement

Client had a business idea and wanted to develop it from scratch

The application should have both web and mobile interfaces.

The key challenge for TechAffinity was the short deadline to develop both the web and mobile application and make it available before a marketing campaign that was pre-committed by the client.

Proposed Solution

TechAffinity opted for Ruby on Rails as the base framework for developing the application, as the framework by itself being completely open-source would reduce the overall application development effort.
A hybrid mobile application using PhoneGap was developed that is compatible with both the IOS and Android.
API driven development methodology was proposed by which the core business logic and concepts were developed as API’s.
TechAffinity developed separate web & mobile views that had to interact only with the APIs to process data from the database.

Some of the Key Functionalities of the Application

A general user (fan) who registers in the app can participate in simple voting.

Receive notifications and reminders about events.

A voting functionality where users can participate on the league functions.

News feeds about the latest league trends.

Proposed Architecture

Data Layer

Database

Server-End

HTTP / JSON Server

Ruby

Rails

Front-End

PhoneGap

AngularJS

Ionic

Mobile Client

iOS

Android

Key Success Factors of the Proposed Solution

The base technology framework opted by TechAffinity is an MVC driven framework which by itself supports an API driven development.

The API driven development architecture allows the client to migrate to any server side technology or to any client side views (IPad, Kiosk, etc.) at any point of time.

Contains database migrations that can be written to replicate database anywhere with ease which helps the customer to have backup DB replicated with minimal effort.

The choice of the RoR framework, API driven development and hybrid mobile development were the essence of this engagement, without which it would have next to impossible to launch the application on such a tight deadline.