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Case Study

Free Advertising App For Businesses


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Due to the emergence of ecommerce/mcommerce the entire world has become a single
marketplace. This clearly means that every brand has to fight its competitors. For business
profits, brands must not only be launched but also promoted well. Further, the brand must
convince each prospect to enroll with its services over its competitors thereby increasing the
marketing cost.

To lower the cost of advertising, client decided to launch a free advertising platform for
businesses. This application provides offers, deals directly to the customers and helps
businesses to promote its products and services. Users can register themselves with their
favorite business and check out the latest offers in a single dashboard. This application runs
on both iOS and Android platforms and encourages user to easily register and accumulate
rewards.

The application includes three main users: Admin/Vendor, User and Owner.

The application owner grants permission to the Admin/Vendor (businesses) to place ads for
customers or users. Admin or Vendors also keep track of the user activities and accordingly
place offers for the users. Vendors can restrict the validity of the offers they place and can
apply desired conditions over the offer redemption.

Users can access the app in two ways: through the native app registration and Facebook
login. It is important to note that each login would display different offers to the users. For
example, Facebook login would display Facebook-tied offers whereas an app login would
display general offers probably by brands other than those reliant on Facebook.

The application features one more important aspect to business promotion OR code
scanning. Users can manually add offers by scanning the QR code at vendors physical
location. After scanning the offer is added to users dashboard and is available publically for
other application users.

The application required secret counter of individual QR code scan called punch cards. This
enabled vendors to record the scans made by every individual user without the user noticing
it.

Client expected the following:

Maintaining two way user login: via registration and via Facebook
Maintaining two dashboards (vendor offer dashboard and punch card dashboard)
Adding feeds such as offer details, news etc. to keep users engaged
Adding complex, secret counter for QR code scanning called punch cards
Reading punch cards and its quick synchronization with vendor system






Client Requirement
Project Challenges
Team faced the following challenges:

Synchronization of QR code scans with vendors application. The sync had to be quick
so that the vendors could quickly send campaign or offers to users device.




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Technologies Used









Manpower










Planning


The following development approach was adopted to equip the site with numerous
features and functionality mentioned below:

Development- High level coding standards were followed to hide the complexity of the
application. Google API was used to simplify the QR code scan practice.

Operating System iOS, Android, Linux, PHP, MYSQL, Multi-Server Architecture with
Staging & Production environment through Version controlling releases
Load Balancer, Apache optimization, security and SSL implementation,
scheduler for backups, alert monitoring system integration, server
performance tuning at regular intervals, software firewall configuration
and maintenance, email server configuration etc.
Development Environment Xcode 4.2.1, Core Data Framework, iOS SDK, MVC, Eclipse, C, Linux,
PHP, MYSQL , Google API etc.
Database SQLite, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, High Availability, Master
Slave Replication, Query optimization, Slow Query Optimization,
scheduler for backups, Alert Monitoring Systemintegration, etc.

Project Leader

1

Developers

2

Designers

1

Quality Assurance Testers

1
Monitoring of barcode scan and punch card calculation.

Dynamically managing design fixed templates: Customer reward dashboard has a
fixed template which had to be dynamically managed while adding deals.




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Simultaneously, practices were adopted for quick sync of QR codes with vendor system
to get response from there.

Designing the application interaction and flow to add user-friendliness and
interactivity.

Syncing existing and newly available data for back-up with our database required
specific attention. This helped in result generation.

The user interface layer was designed for cross-platform compatibility.

Architecture

Application Life Cycle
The application life cycle constitutes the sequence of events that occurs between the launch and
termination of your application. In iPhone/iPad OS, the user launches the application by tapping
its icon on the Home screen. Shortly after the tap occurs, the system displays some transitional
graphics and proceeds to launch your application by calling its main function. From this point on,
the bulk of the initialization work is handed over to UIKit which loads the applications user
interface and readies its event loop. During the event loop, UIKit coordinates the delivery of
events to your custom objects and responds to commands issued by your application. When the
user performs an action that would cause your application to quit, UIKit notifies your application
and begins the termination process.

The following figure depicts the simplified life cycle of an iPhone application. This diagram shows
the sequence of events that occur from the time the application starts up to the time it quits. At
initialization and termination, UIKit sends specific messages to the applications delegate object
to let it know what is happening. During the event loop, UIKit dispatches events to your
applications custom event handlers.

Figure: Application life cycle







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Event Handling Cycle
After the UI Application main function initializes the application it starts the infrastructure needed to
manage the applications event and drawing cycle which is depicted in the following figure. As the
user interacts with a device, iPhone/iPad OS detects touch events and places them in the
applications event queue. The event-handling infrastructure of the UI Application object takes each
event off the top of this queue and delivers it to the object that best suited to handle it. For example,
a touch event occurring in a button would be delivered to the corresponding button object. Events
can also be delivered to controller objects and other objects indirectly responsible for handling touch
events in the application.

Figure: The event and drawing cycle


In the iPhone OS Multi-Touch event model, touch data is encapsulated in a single event object (UI
Event). To track individual touches, the event object contains touch objects (UI Touch) one for each
finger that is touching the screen. As the user places fingers on the screen, moves them around and
finally removes them from the screen, the system reports the changes for each finger
in the corresponding touch object.

When it launches an application, the system creates both a process and a single thread for that
application. This initial thread becomes the applications main thread and is where the UI Application
object sets up the main run loop and configures the applications event-handling code. Figure shows
the relationship of the event-handling code to the main run loop. Touch events sent by the system
are queued until they can be processed by the applications main run loop.

Figure: Processing events in the main run loop




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The MVC Architecture is a combination of Model-View-Controller.

1. Model: The model object knows about all the data that need to be displayed. It is model
who is aware about all the operations that can be applied to transform that object. It only
represents the data of an application. The model represents enterprise data and the business
rules that govern access to and updates of this data. Model is not aware about the
presentation data and how that data will be displayed to the browser.

2. View: The view represents the presentation of the application. The view object refers to the
model. It uses the query methods of the model to obtain the contents and renders it. The
view is not dependent on the application logic. It remains same if there is any modification in
the business logic. In other words, we can say that it is the responsibility of the view's to
maintain the consistency in its presentation when the model changes.

3. Controller: Whenever the user sends a request for something then it always go through the
controller. The controller is responsible for intercepting the requests from view and passes it
to the model for the appropriate action. After the action has been taken on the data, the
controller is responsible for directing the appropriate view to the user. In GUIs, the views
and the controllers often work very closely together.





Development Highlights


This application for iPhone and Android is built around objective C and Java. The main feature of this
application is QR code scanning which was implemented using Google API. Almost all the modules
were developed using foundation, core graphics and UIKIT frameworks. The objective of application
revolves around business promotion while presenting offers to customers. All the view controllers
were linked with controller files project along with the outlets, actions of the UI element. SQLITE
framework was used to maintain and store all the details locally. The site was developed and fully
functional within a span of 4 months.