Case Study - FaceFun - Flash Application Development and .NET Integration

The Client

Over the last two decades have established a reputation as an industry leader in marketing products and services through financial institutions. The company develops multi-channel marketing solutions that drive consumer behavior and help our clients achieve their goals, many of which are Fortune 100 companies. The client's corporate headquarters is located in One Park Avenue, New York.

The Opportunity

The client was looking for a vendor, with an ability to build flash based applications. The company was creating a website that will give users the opportunity to upload personal photos, which can then be inserted into "cut-outs" of various characters in the form of moving animations/videos with audio as well as still pictures. The client was looking to include flash components within the .NET application, with features like -

• Integration between Flash and .NET Web pages
• Easy to use User Interface

The Project

Inkriti studied the project thoroughly. The project was implemented as per Inkriti's global delivery methodology with development engineers in India and US and the project being managed from India.
The solution was planned to be developed in Flash and Action Script 3. The key modules in the project included -

• Developing the Flash Application - ability to upload photos, crop heads and save the cropped images.
• Load videos into the video area
• Drag and Drop cropped heads to the video
• Save Videos
• Integrate with the Web pages
• Integrate with the web services

The Challenges

• The solution was being implemented in a multi vendor environment. While Inkriti was developing the flash application another vendor was developing the website. Inkriti team had to test the flash application and ensure that it works, when integrated with the web application.
• For the final deployment, the images and the flash files shall be hosted on Servers using the CDN technology. During development, these were to be stored on a single file server. With strict domain related policies in Flash, it was not that easy to move the application seamlessly from the dev environment to the staging environment.
• From the functional requirements and the web service definitions, there was a good amount of over lap across the features. From the project point of view it was important to see how this can be used to avoid code redundancy and design for maintainability.

Inkriti's Approach

• The team simulated the web application by building HTML pages (as Test Stubs) and embedding the flash application within these HTML pages.This helped the project to cut down the QA efforts on the staging server.
• At Inkriti, while developing the flash application, it was simultaneously tested for cross domain issues and also for sub domain related issues. This has given the team a good understanding of what issues can occur when the content would be moved to CDN servers.
• The Technical Team held discussions to see what can be reused and suggested a common XML for 2 of the web services. This step resulted in reducing the integration effort on web services by 20%.

The Technology

• Flash 9
• Action Script 3
• XML
• Web Services