Casestudy : The Hotel

Hummingblue approached Toobler technologies in the hope to reinvent online room service for the hotel industry in Australia and to date we have build both an iPad application and android application on a multi-tenant architecture, and we are still figuring out what suits the hotel industry in Australia - iPad or Android.

TARGET

To build a Tablet Application using SaaS business model for on demand room service in Cloud Infrastructure for reputed hotels in Australia.

Challenges & Solution

Challenge 1

Architectural Consulting for Hotel Management SaaS tablet application.

Solution

Multi-Tenant architecture with an operational database to limit server load on Tablet application.

The mobile application development team at Toobler carefully studied the architectural requirements and the use cases of the SaaS tablet application and we proposed a multi-tenant architecture with an additional local operational database so that the app works offline. We insisted the local database be build around a web service API to store JSON payloads or pending requests.

Challenge 2

Is hybrid approach a viable solution for SaaS tablet application ?

Solution

Hybrid approach to building a multi-tenant SaaS tablet application is not feasible as of 2014.

Initially we build a prototype to figure out if hybrid approach to build this SaaS hotel management tablet application is feasible or not. Our lead engineers at the mobile app development team quickly build a prototype and deployed the app in all the popular mobile platforms using the popular hybrid tools - Phonegap and Titanium. We encountered somany performance issues with the app in all the platforms and we ended up with a build which was either native nor web. Hence we had to switch towards native app development cause it seems Phonegap and Titanium werent ready yet.

Design

app screen

dashboard

View Screens

Technology

We choose iOS to create the best Tablet experience for hotels in Australia but most of hotels in Australia were willing to check if they we could reinvent the same experience with Android. Hence we deployed to both iOS and Android.

Android Native Development kit

Android provides headers and libraries that allow you to build activities, handle user input, use hardware sensors, access application resources, and more.