Goals
Lowe's is an American retailer of building materials.
The company owns a chain of supermarkets across the United States of America. As an IT company it provides SOAP services.
Due to the agreement there was a task to create software for integration with the Lowe’s SOAP services.
The customer provided technical specifications, according to which it was required to create SOAP server to receive and process order requests, credit and cancels.
We also needed to develop the client side, which would provide an opportunity to send order confirmations, shipping, and invoices for Lowe's SOAP server.
We also needed to develop the admin panel, which should be searching and filtering data. Besides the admin panel should include the ability to send requests for Lowe's SOAP-server, export all the data in the CSV format, automatically synchronize data with the system Lotus Notes.
Solution
According to SOAP specifications the server was developed using PHP. The admin panel has been developed using CodeIgniter PHP-framework. This framework at the time of development of the project was one of the most advanced MVC technologies, which provided a large number of user-friendly tools with relatively high productivity. To develop a user interface we took as a basis ExtJS JavaScript framework, which contains a large number of ready-made solutions.
MySQL database management system was used to store data. However, during the operation of the system there was a high load on the server. As a result, it was decided to replace the MySQL database with a more powerful Percona Server.
During the development process the following technologies and libraries were used: SOAP, PHP, JavaScript, XML parser, XSLT transformation, ActiveRecord DB library, SVN, ExtJS, jQuery, Ajax, CSS, HTML, MySQL, Percona Server, PHP¬ framework Codeigniter.
During the technical support process the entire system of integration with Lowe's store was fully automated thanks to the flexibility of the Lotus Notes workflow system. We have developed a software mechanism using LotusScript.
Team
- curator of the project - development, distribution and control of tasks;
- PHP programmer - development of SOAP services and server-side control panel;
- JavaScript programmer - development of client-side;
- tester - testing of the system functionality.
Duration
While studying the technical specifications we have set 2 months terms of development. In addition to direct development the estimation included the time to learn the service principles. Thanks to the good team cooperation, proper distribution of tasks and high professionalism expected terms of development were reduce by almost 2 times.
The project was successfully put into operation on the client server in 5 weeks since the start of the project.
