PROJECT OVERVIEW
An Enterprise News Reader Platform for iPad Tablets.
The news belongs to various topics of interest and is aggregated from a variety of sources on the internet in the form of RSS feeds. There is a constant need on the customer side to receive personalized recommendations and news based on interesting topics, this ensures customization. Plus, the aggregation of news helps readers to stay on top of information. The news content should also be saved for offline reading with limited or no access to the internet.
In fact, when you want to follow specific writers, publications, and channels – to see every piece of content they publish – nothing beats an RSS reader. RSS access web feeds published by websites, letting you aggregate and curate content you care about. Instead of visiting multiple sites, just open one RSS feeds to see all the content in the central source.
TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication ‘or ‘Rich Site Summary’. RSS is a type of web interface which allows users and applications to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator.
The news aggregator will automatically check the RSS feed for new content, allowing the content to be automatically passed from website to website or from website to user. This passing of content is called web syndication.
RSS feed data is presented to users using software called a news aggregator. This aggregator can be built into a website, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device. Users subscribe to feeds either by entering a feed’s URI into the reader or by clicking on the browser’s feed icon.
The RSS reader checks the user’s feeds regularly for new information and can automatically download it if that function is enabled. The reader also provides a user interface.
THE REQUIREMENT
The client company sought to provide value to its customers by providing quality and relevant content. With the advent of mobile technology and subsequently its adoption, news content viewership on mobile has increased significantly. Mobile content publishing is key to success, yet companies fail at executing the right mobile content strategy.
New digital platforms are being introduced daily, and it can be difficult for publishers to cope with these advancements. At the same time, new technologies provide seamless content in real-time.
Content fit mobile reading experience is the key buzz. The content should fit on all screens hassle free without much platform dependency.
Client sensed then to reach their audience base with a digital platform, providing the latest news and information, and allowing the viewers to read, share and subscribe from the mobile device.
Thus, aroused the need for a concrete content publishing system, with an incredible mobile experience including a very light version of the application.
The Solution
There are two parts to the solution – 1. Server, and 2. Tablet Viewer.
Server
Using open source technologies like PHP, and MySQL, along with Amazon cloud infrastructure components like AWS, and S3, Emorphis has designed a scalable architecture that has various components related to relevant tasks like:
- Feed Processing: Process the RSS Feed XML and get all articles from that feed.
- Article Processing: Reads article from the web, clean the content, and stores them in a well-formatted manner. Pulls out relevant images associated with the article and indexes for later use.
- Keyword Processing: Index relevant keywords from the article and associate them with relevancy scores. This is used for finding relevant articles.
- REST-based API for consumption of Tablet applications.
- Auto-scaling features were developed to increase/decrease the number of instances of cron jobs based on pending processing status. This is fully automatic and runs 24/7.
- Admin console to manage various news sources, users, and configuration of the system.
Tablet Viewer
Tablet Viewer: iOS application that uses REST APIs to create an interesting application for News Reading. A very intuitive user-friendly interface was created.
APPLICATION BENEFITS
From a technical standpoint, the application offers several benefits:
- Scalability: The application architecture is a set of collaborating stateless components, conducive to adaptive load-balancing mechanisms.
- Availability: The data storage and retrieval mechanisms are carefully designed to facilitate replication/distribution in order to make the system more fault tolerant.
- Multi-tenancy: The server side of the application is designed to support multi-tenancy in a SaaS scenario, where multiple enterprise customers can co-exist in the system.
- Cloud Readiness: More and more companies are becoming conscious of the money that they are spending on the maintenance of existing computing infrastructure. With the advent of different cloud-based services, they are moving to the less expensive and convenient option of pay-per-use. It is, therefore, very necessary that server applications are designed in such a way that it makes it easy to deploy on the cloud. Therefore, this application’s server architecture has this as one of its key features. The server-side components are cloud-ready.
TECHNOLOGY
- PHP
- MySQL
- RESTful web services
- Amazon EC2
- XML
About Emorphis
Emorphis Technologies is a world-class software development and solutions company that truly believes in “Innovation in motion”. Delivery innovation on the go at an accelerated pace has been our success mantra to date. Over the years we have provided value to our clients in the field of enterprise mobility, cloud, IoT, backend development, Big Data Analytics, and BlockChain.
We serve industries ranging from unicorns, and startups to large multinationals in the healthcare, telecommunications, fintech, retail, and publishing industry. Our go-to-market software products – iStatement, iPublisher, and iBuggy have proved our metal with positive beneficial customer testimonials. We help our clients with successful product development, consulting services, and testing (manual & automated).
We have profound experience & expertise in various technologies like .Net, J2EE, PHP, iOS, Android, and Cloud Computing viz. Amazon Web services (AWS), Software QA & testing (Manual & Automation). Our designed products are cloud-ready and can be readily deployed on AWS/Azure cloud infrastructure.
Our pivot on engineering innovation and R&D helps quicken time-to-market, ensuring high quality at economies of scale, delivering cult competency for the global marketplace. We ensure that your ideas, concepts, and requirements are backed by brilliant execution at our end. Having said that we extend end-to-end ownership of product/application design, development, and deployment.
