Summary

eKit.com provides integrated communication and interactive serivces to travel communities and needed a web system to interface into an RDBMS-based telephony platform. This web system was intended for both internal use, such as managing users and systems, and external use, such as allowing customers to manipulate their accounts.

Case Facts

eKit.com's services needed to expand rapidly to cover the provision of a whole host of web-based services. Customers needed to be able to manage their accounts, set up guest accounts that can leave them voicemail, monitor their billing, and even download their voice messages over the web.

Problem

The systems used inside eKit.com included two different database servers, accessible to both internal and external users. External customers accessed the web interface to create and manage their accounts.

Internal users accessed the same systems to manage the users, manage the databases that control the systems, and generate reports. There are additionally, a variety of other tasks being performed, which also put resource demands upon those systems.

Solution

eKit.com's first foray with Zope was to have it employ the backend database to store and manipulate end-user details, while keeping any changes made to the production data in sync with the production databases (running on a different vendor's RDBMS). In addition, it needed to interact with an external credit card processing system, an email server (to trigger creation and deletion of mailboxes), and it had to be built in a very short period of time.

Zope allowed for the very rapid development of this initial platform (actually in a matter of just two "man-weeks" total time). Zope made it easy to proceed from this first stage, changing the core look and feel while also working seperately to add new features to the web site. The structure of Zope made it possible to have multiple people working on different sections of the site, with some working on structure and behaviour, and others working on the content (words and graphics), all at the same time, without compromising the integrity of each application!

A word on Zope's SQL integration: It makes it so easy to build database-enabled systems, that it made the eKit.com team many times lament the lost time previously spent building CGI-based applications.

The design of the eKit.com site is such that new features can be added and tested incrementally. For example a live feature was recently added and tested that allows a customer to listen to their voice messages via a web browser.

Moving forward, Zope's access control, support for easy upgrading of the web objects (through Zope Versions), database access, and simple extensibility will allow eKit.com to interface new components into the system, while adding new behaviour to the existing components.

The access control will also allow for the integration with external partners, and to make available to them the parts of the system that may be exposed - and all in an effective and efficient way.