Perl

Our company has created a software product "only.com" for implementation a series of thematic portals. Over 10000 different sites are organized under common user database and engine.

Data structure:

To ease the data management of the system the relational data structure was adapted using SQL. All data are stored in 8 databases with vertical splitting by functional criterion to enable distributed functionality. It's possible to deploy every database on a dedicated database server without software modification. Beside that, project solutions enable a horizontal splitting of databases and mirror databases creation with automatic synchronization.

During software system implementation our own methods of "clever" CGI programming were used:

HTML template technology (full separation of software code and HTML code, to allow web designers and software developers to work independently from each other).

Kernel - the executable for template processing, plug-ins executing and carrying out of common system tasks, such as user authentication procedures, points earning, statistics, audit, etc.

"Plug-in" technology - the ability of smooth development and attachment of additional software modules. These modules can interact with common databases without difficulties and with each other, using well-designed internal interface.

Software system runs in mod_perl environment. That ensures high performance of the system and access to internal Apache structures. 

Interface: Search interface was improved to allow various search criterions and display of Description and detailed property information. To enable easy listings management For Agents Only section's interface was developed. Interface of Admin section was changed to allow management team to Add/Delete agents, assign passwords, generate reports, etc.

Agent Account System: Each agent was given an ID# which was required to enter listings. Agents gained the ability to enter, delete and edit their listings.

Timeout Listing Utility: Listings were made inactive automatically after specified period starting from the input date. The system would store all inactive listings for additional 30 day-period in an alternate storage component.

E-mail notification system: When listing is deleted by the system automatic e-mail notification is generated and sent to the specific agent.

Administrator Features: Administrators can do the following: add and delete a new agent into the account system, delete individual listing, delete all of the agent's listings after the agent is removed from the system, set the limit on the amount of listings per one agent, access inactive listings.

Log and reports: Different types of queries were enabled: query by total number of listings of a given agent within a certain time period; query by total number of listings within the database; query by Price Ranges, Size and Location. 

The internet Newspaper: news blogs video community

The Huffington Post portal was launched May 9, 2005 and very soon it became extremely popular.

While one reason of the apparent success of this portal is that their contributors are popular journalists and well-known personalities from politics, business, and entertainment, the other reason is that the development team has been able to provide a technical solution that was up to the challenge.

Task:

To implement a news portal capable of sustaining heavy load, including peak load, and convenient for both visitors and authors of the entries.
 

Challenge - making definite entries appear among the results of running search engines queries, SEO optimization; - simultaneous maintaining of a large number of users; - quick generation of pages that contain dynamic and static data.

Solution

The portal is based on the MovableType platform, which has been modified to minimize the number of database queries and to improve performance. To load a server in order to process pictures, CSS and other statistic content, Amazon S3 is used.

To ensure stable and efficient work under heavy and peak loads we have used the memcache technology, which is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that allows speeding up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in memory to reduce the number of times the database must be read.

QArea developers have implemented a rather serious new functionality for this site: basing on Google Maps API it was created our own custom map that operates a large number of images generated by our team, works with large amount of data (about a million rows) and supports a huge number of users.

A powerful statistics system has been implemented in the back-end: there is a statistics of tracking of entries, statistics of visits referred from different search engines. There is also statistics of the sites referring to huffingtonpost.com and general tracking of keywords/key phrases which can be used to refer the users to the site.

Result

The site has been featured on the main page of Yahoo several times. The site lives perfectly with 200+k visitors per hour.

http://qarea.com/news_pages/news76/news-details.php

Development of services and API for partners of iPharmacist using MVC-based, Rails-like own system using Perl.

iPharmacist is a complex system, which helps pharmacy staff, managers and owners to track working hours, calculate pharmacists' bonuses and many more. Part of the system are mobile device applications (Palm, PocketPC, etc), another part is web interface for administering pharmacies, pharmacists, working hours, building graphs and many more. Handheld devices are synchronized on a regular basis with the website, new updates are downloaded, and user activity is uploaded to website. Created WSDL modules for exchanging data with canadian pharmaceutical companies. Developed web-based part of the iPharmacist project. Implemented PDB export/import to/from handheld devices.