Case Study
Scaling Innovation Around the Globe
Open source web application framework accelerates global expansion for e-commerce ticketing merchant
In today's economy, establishing a firm foothold in a new market ahead of the competition often comes down to the ability to build the necessary e-commerce infrastructure fast enough to move into your target territory first.
The Client
An e-commerce merchant that facilitates secondary-market ticket transactions for sporting matches, live concerts, theatrical performances, and other entertainment events
The Opportunity
At the time, no viable ticket exchange facilitator had established a foothold in China, Japan, South Korea, or India.
The company's senior executives recognized two key facts that made it clear they needed to act – and act quickly!
- This territory represented a booming e-commerce market.
- It was only a matter of time before another similar service saw the same opportunity and moved in to establish dominance.
The Challenge
To quickly expand its Asian operations ahead of the competition, the company set out to scale its existing e-commerce platform to accommodate:
- A massive influx in transactions
- Translation into multiple additional languages
- Culture-specific UI/UX expectations
And it all needed to be accomplished within an incredibly tight timeline.
Technical Parameters
This initiative demanded a development plan focused on speed and stability.
Understanding that a misstep in platform choice would likely mean giving up the first-mover advantage, the engineering team required a development platform that allowed them to experiment quickly and "fail fast" if their choice did not prove optimal.
Company leaders identified a list of requirements to accomplish their objective. The development platform they selected had to:
- Facilitate rapid development
- Offer a smooth learning curve
- Integrate with their existing investments in Java, Hibernate, and Spring
- Be robust enough to handle a large, complex e-commerce system
- Allow for future expansion beyond the current initiative
- Fit within the company's budget
The Solution
In selecting a development platform, company leaders identified Object Computing's open source Grails framework as a solution that fulfilled all of their requirements.
- Grails, which has been described as “Java on steroids,” facilitates rapid application development for companies that have invested in JVM-based technologies.
- Convention-over-configuration, sensible defaults, opinionated APIs, and the Groovy language combine to make Grails easy to learn for Java developers.
- Grails seamlessly and transparently integrates and interoperates with Java, the JVM, and existing Java EE containers. It's built on top of Spring Boot and leverages Spring Boot's time-saving features, such as Spring-powered dependency injection.
- Grails is an enterprise-class development framework designed specifically to optimize performance in large, complex systems, like e-commerce platforms.
- The Grails framework applies the “Don't Repeat Yourself” (DRY) principle, thereby eliminating repetition and hidden bugs, and enabling faster and easier enhancements.
- Because Grails is an open source framework, its users are not tied to long-term contracts or licensing costs, making it an ideal framework for budget-conscious businesses.
Business Outcomes
Leveraging a capable and scalable technology platform, the company's development team was able to expand their existing platform quickly and efficiently, allowing the company to gain first-mover advantage in the Asian market.
The company emerged an online ticketing giant, boasting stronger business capabilities, including advanced web applications, higher-quality customer service, and sales tools across 31 countries.
Consulting & Strategy
Outcome-focused, real-world practicality combined with courageous innovation
Technology & Transformation
Expert engineering from project initiation to deployment and beyond
Technical Leadership & Support
Empowerment to scale your solutions long after our engagement has ended
