aral Archive at SWX: SWF Data Format

The Gal To Gal Foundation has a new web site and online campaign for the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk 2007. It aims to improve the lives of women diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer and is expected to raise $1m. The site is due to be featured on the Martha Stewart Show on Monday, October 1st to a national audience in the United States.

The site it uses SWX RPC, with a SWX PHP back-end.

Jon MacDonald has a case study of the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk project, wherein he explains that the entire site was built in one-and-a-half weeks:

SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.

Read more about GalToGalWalk.org in my blog post and on Jon's case study.

View the site here.

The idea for Toni’s Bauernsuche (Toni’s Farmer-Search) resulted from a project Muevo did together with one of our partners, Moodley.

The clients’ company, Toni’s Freilandeier, sells free range eggs that come from farmers in the local area. With the re-launch of his website the client required a feature showing his customers the origin of each egg (every egg sold in Austria has a special control number printed on its shell, connecting it to a specific farmer, and indicating how the animals are kept).

The Flash microsite allows users to browse information about the farmers who supply Toni’s (and are therefore committed to strict quality standards). It shows photographs, detailed information such as the number of hens, contact addresses, and phone numbers. Users can also directly search for specific farmers using the farmer’s name, ZIP code, or egg control number as search criteria.

Technical Facts

The project consists of two major parts: a Flash frontend for visualization and a PHP backend for content management. The data is held in a MS SQL database provided and maintained by the client’s company.

The PHP backend handles database connectivity and functionality for data retrieval, including search and random search queries. All content is loaded dynamically at runtime, including the loading of images, which is served by a binary action. The backend is based on the CakePHP framework, which
allows a rapid development of the necessary database handling, and a simple administration area to directly maintain content and images online.
Using Wouter Verweirder‘s great CakeSWXPHP implementation, it was fairly straightforward to add SWX functionality to the backend.

The frontend is implemented in Flash and ActionScript 2.0. By encapsulating the business logic in several distinct classes by making use of best-practice software design patterns like facades and singleton objects, it was easy for both (non-programming) designers and more advanced software engineers to work together on this project. SWX integrated very well through its object oriented approach.

How It Uses SWX

At the beginning of the project we had a close look at different techniques for implementing Flash to the backend communication. With most techniques the necessary “overhead” for sending and retrieving data to and from the backend was far too high. After discovering SWXFormat.org it was soon clear that this would be the way to go. SWX not only has a low overhead when it comes to necessary function calls for data preparation and retrieval, but through its binary file format the processing of the retrieved data is also a snap.

View the site.

For full details, please refer to these PDFs: Contest Submission, Back-end details.