By leveraging the Grails framework to expand its existing e-commerce platform, a leading ticket exchange facilitator gained first-mover advantage in the Asian market and emerged an online ticketing giant, boasting stronger business capabilities, better customer service, and sales tools across 31 countries.
Client
An e-commerce merchant that facilitates secondary-market ticket transactions for sporting matches, live concerts, theatrical performances, and other entertainment events
Opportunity
China, Japan, South Korea, and India represented a booming e-commerce market, and no viable ticket exchange facilitator had yet established a foothold there.
Challenge
To scale an existing e-commerce platform quickly enough to expand Asian operations ahead of the competition
In today's economy, establishing a firm foothold in a new market ahead of the competition often comes down to the ability to build the necessary e-commerce infrastructure fast enough to move into your target territory first.
Grails framework
- Is an enterprise-class development framework designed specifically to optimize performance in large, complex systems, like e-commerce platforms.
- Facilitates rapid application development for companies that have invested in JVM-based technologies.
- Combines convention-over-configuration, sensible defaults, opinionated APIs, and the Groovy language, making it easy for Java developers to learn.
- Seamlessly and transparently integrates and interoperates with Java, the JVM, and existing Java EE containers.
- Is built on top of Spring Boot and leverages Spring Boot's time-saving features, such as Spring-powered dependency injection.
- Applies the “Don't Repeat Yourself” (DRY) principle, thereby eliminating repetition and hidden bugs, and enabling faster and easier enhancements.
- Is open source, so its users are not tied to long-term contracts or licensing costs, making it ideal for budget-conscious businesses.
To build an upgraded e-commerce platform that could accommodate:
- A massive influx in transactions
- Translation into multiple additional languages
- Culture-specific UI/UX expectations
... the development platform selected by the engineering team had to:
- Be robust enough to handle a large, complex e-commerce system
- Facilitate rapid development
- Offer a smooth learning curve
- Integrate with their existing investments in Java, Hibernate, and Spring
- Allow for future expansion beyond the current initiative
- Fit within the company's budget
Grails is an agile development framework that reduces time to market and gives us needed web application development velocity.
With Grails and its fantastic built-in testing framework, we have increased core logic coverage, while simultaneously reducing application bugs.
Another KPI that makes our product better is that using Grails makes our developers more productive and happy, which makes everyone happy – including the business.