yourfreebooking.com

Inheritance

Just like Flowey CMD, yourfreebooking.com is a project that TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ inherited from a team that had started its development, but was unable to bring it to a close. Structurally sane, with only a few flaws in the build process, this MEAN (Mongo, Express, Angular, NodeJs)-based project unfortunately never reached a state under the initial team where it could have been deployed to production. TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ accepted the challenge to dig into an existing code-base, bring the project to completion, and handle all infrastructure aspects.

Having sorted through a first batch of challenges, such as merging in half a dozen feature branches that were in no obvious order and often in an indeterminate state, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ proceeded with updating the existing code-base and weeding out any unused code and functionalities.

Implementation of the core concept of yourfreebooking.com, the algorithm that allows 1 in 100 bookings to be fully refunded, was completely up to TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ and so was both error handling and managing booking state, which we’ll dive into a little later.

As an Expedia Affiliate Network partner site, yourfreebooking.com makes use of their EAN-API to retrieve hotel information and place bookings. Having been through a few revisions since development on yourfreebooking.com had been halted, the node module developed to communicate with this API – whose documentation is, to be totally blunt, a little challenging – had to be brought up to speed and adapted to the most recent API version.

Challenges

Briefly after the page first went live, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ faced a new problem: Expedia had deprecated the part of its API that was used to identify cities and regions and decided to remove it just as swiftly. Having already previously discussed ditching this part of the API and replacing it with our very own location index on an ElasticSearch server, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ had no other choice but to put this plan into action as fast as possible.

In the end, having our own search engine allowed us to get more reliable results, adding support for fuzzy search and ngrams, and empowered us to add more lucene powered functionality in the medium run. Having ES in place, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ has begun adding hotel search and suggestions.

Two additional challenges in this otherwise straightforward project were handling bookings and errors. The EAN API defines a large range of possible errors related to bookings, credit cards, etc., but forewarns that this list is nowhere near exhaustive. Indeed, since EAN themselves are forwarding some requests to their suppliers and in turn returning their errors and exceptions, it’s possible that the system encounters errors it has never seen before and doesn’t yet know how to handle. Is the error critical or can the user resume his booking? Error handling has turned out to be a real challenge in this project.

Likewise bookings: whenever a customer books a hotel on yourfreebooking.com, a booking request is dispatched through the EAN API. The initial state of any booking is UNDEFINED and with most bookings, this state quickly resolves to CONFIRMED. So quick in fact that the status is returned with the response to our initial request. Some requests however take some time to resolve, which is why TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ had to implement a service that stores any unresolved bookings in a redis key-value store and regularly queries the EAN service for their state. For bookings that do not resolve after a pre-defined period, customers may choose to either cancel or get notified by mail once the state of their booking resolves.

Further Development

While the site is up and running since April 2017, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ is constantly adding new functionality and improving both the project’s scaffolding as well as stability.

When TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ inherited the project, it did not have any tests, unit or functional. Now that the site is both complete and, as such, starting to become more complex, we have begun adding functional tests using protractor, which makes us sleep better at night, knowing that new features are less likely to leave regressions undetected.

Including all dependencies and assets, the current code-base delivered to a client weighs in at around 4 whopping Megabytes! While the project is currently still using both node and bower components and browserify/gulp for the build process, TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ is planning to migrate to a webpack set-up in the short run in order to be able to profit from its tree-shaking optimization.

Who you gonna call?

With Flowey CMD, yourfreebooking.com, some WordPress sites and several projects in the pipeline, one can say that TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴ has a package of expertise up their sleeves when it comes to taking over development and maintenance on existing projects.

Development, infrastructure and monitoring, all taken care of by TenTwentyFour¹⁰²⁴.

If you or your company need a hand on a project that needs to be brought up to speed or a final touch, don’t hesitate to contact us!