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Lastminute.com, the online travel company, was looking to rebuild the front-end architecture of its website using the new open-source Web server Zope.
The system needed:
- To sustain extremely high levels of traffic
- A high degree of personalization, so that it can give highly targeted information to each user.
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To be very flexible and fast to develop with:
- letting their business people try out different configurations while not upsetting the design workflow
- making it easier for design and business teams to collaborate on their multiple brands and locales.
The company was attracted by Zope, a toolkit for content management, because of its flexible templating system that can help Lastminute achieve its aims very quickly. Further, using Zope would give it control over the code.
Other benefits of Zope include:
- It integrates well with other open source solutions such as the Squid caching server.
- Lastminute are able to customise it exactly how they want.
- It is a very good "glue" language - ideal for Lastminute as their platform runs on many different systems, with the backend parts written in Java, for example, while the new system is written in Python, an "up and coming" programming language to rival Java.
- It allows Lastminute to use a range of different technologies, so that they are not dependent on a single supplier.
Lastminute approached Jamkit for their expertise with Zope in particular. In response, Jamkit designed and built a proof-of-concept framework for Lastminute to help test the robustness of the system and to demonstrate that a Zope + Squid front-end could support the high levels of traffic expected over the next couple of years.
Jamkit also provided them with consultancy on how best to implement the application as it replaces all of its front-end templates with the Zope system.