Project Summary: Sterling Global Solutions LLC, Sparkfly Employee Perks Website
Background
Sterling Global Solutions LLC is the company behind the Sparkfly website. Sparkfly offers a program of employee perks, allowing the employees of participating companies to receive discounts on a range of goods and services from tickets to the movie theater to home electronics and travel. The Sparkfly website runs on JBoss and Tomcat and uses an Oracle database backend. The site is deployed on Linux servers.
After a challenging period following the dot com bust, Sterling emerged as a small-midsize business and as one of the quality survivors who demonstrated that they really had a business behind the model. But tight times had resulted in languishing technology that required maintenance and updating.
Solution
One of SDI’s partners stepped in to provide a broad range of support and analysis serving in the roll of CIO and chief architect for updating both hardware and software systems. By providing and overseeing and upgrade path that led to lower costs and increased performance and reliability.
- Requirements
- Database Design
- Training and Basic Application Design
- Writing and Developing an Application
The requirements for this project were necessarily broad. The goal was to improve the overall data infrastructure of the company as well as implement the redesign of the current website.
The current database design is implemented in Oracle 8, and data access is provided via enterprise beans held by the JBoss application server. Performance and features of Oracle 10 were compared with the recently open sourced Ingres r3 and PostgreSQL to provide a cost vs. performance analysis to determine the most cost effective data migration path.
All decisions and discoveries were documented for the client and reviewed with at least two employees to ensure technical awareness and continuity for final handover to internal resources.
The new application is written in Java and JSP and built upon the Struts open source framework along with JBoss and Tomcat. Standard open source Java tools such as Eclipse, Log4J, and JUnit were used to construct the new website.
About the Application
Due to the analysis of equipment in the data center and the resulting restructuring and elimination of unnecessary servers, a first year savings of over $80,000 has already been achieved in Phase I of the project. While some performance and reliability gains have been achieved through the reconfiguration and replacement of some older equipment, much more dramatic improvements are anticipated with the upcoming re-architecture of the data infrastructure and implementation of clustering.