Web Application for Fitness Professionals
The customer
A web application designed to help fitness industry professionals, such as trainers, clubs, and sportsmen, interact with each other efficiently, keep track of scheduled workouts, appointments, earnings, and expenses in real time. The application also delivers a complete administration and reporting system for users.
The need
The existing Web application was working very slow, so the first need was to enhance its performance. The customer wanted to add new features: the exact schedule with automatic reminders, the online payment system to handle money transfers between clubs. The customer also needed to customize the product so it can also be used for the educational purposes.
The challenges
The team had to fix a number of critical bugs. There were too many security issues. All information was stored on the server without an encrypted connection, which could cause information leakage. The code structure and application architecture were outdated.
The solution
The team re-designed the architecture of the solution: weak places in code that were responsible for security issues were fixed, as well as many other bugs that affected the overall performance. They also optimized the database structure and made some code-refactoring. To improve the schedule, and the entire performance, the team implemented jQuery framework. This allowed speeding up the entire application by dozens of times and eased the means for future maintenance. The team developed new modules. For example, appointments can be now created either by the trainer or the client, allowing them to find suitable training activity. There are numerous helper features for appointments, allowing user to book an appointment for the specific trainer from the specific club, receive SMS reminders, pay for the number of sessions in advance, etc.
The team customized the application, so it can now be used not only to set appointments between trainers and sportsmen, but also to generate reports and keep track of expenses. Utilizing the localization technology, the application detects to which club, university, or sports organization the user belongs when he or she logs into the system. The structure and the interface of the application changes accordingly. The application can also be customized for other purposes.
The outcome
The solution is now a highly secure application that provides high and stable performance. The performance was increased by dozens of times and attracted a fortune of new users. The application can be customized to fit the purposes of other industries. The customer already implements this new solution in a number of fitness clubs in in the UK, this way creating an additional revenue channel for his company.
Server Platform
Multiplatform
Client Platform/Application Server
Web browser/Nginx + Passenger
Technology
Ruby On Rails, JavaScript, jQuery
Programming language
Ruby
Database
MySQL
Development Environment
NetBeanse, Textmate