Case Study

Description

Image editor, delivery management and payment system combined together in one application for quick photo products creation using smartphones. Basing on the selected format, it allows users to prepare photo packages for printing and to create phone cases with individual design.

Challenges

• Photo package editor
• Editor for creating custom design of case for selected phone model
• Communication with a printer management system, devices health, ink-levels monitoring
• Order estimation time based on store opening hours, available printers

Approach

Embrox decided to use Qt + QML abilities for mobile application development in order to cover the requirement of common UX/UI for Android and IOS application. Since customer specified payment system, which provides platform-dependent libraries only, the team has developed wrapper with common interface for IOS and Android systems.

The server API has been splitted into Public and Admin parts working separately to achieve better security level. The order time-prediction system task has been resolved by integration of printer supply-levels and order management subsystems together. Together with business hours info, this allowed us to implement mechanism of average order processing time calculations and to design time prediction system for specific orders.

Key features

• Online payments
• Delivery management
• Flexible discounts for regular users
• Order status tracking

Results

The application has been started with photo printing flow support, including choosing of photo format and material, photo editing (cropping, rotation, filters) and building orders with automatic prices calculation and individual user discounts. The application provides several ways of order delivery and also allows user to select the nearest location in case he wants to pick up the order by himself. User profile allows to specify personal data for faster order formation, view available discounts and track state of personal orders.

The server part includes smart time prediction system of order processing based on available printers, printer supply-levels, number of orders in the queue and other factors, like business hours, national holidays, etc. Thanks to flexible public API, it could be used for creating new products besides mobile application (web-version print ordering system, desktop application, etc). The opportunities of Admin API allows to build powerful admin dashboard with to control the whole system workflow (available products, materials, prices, etc) and building order statistic reports.

Technologies and Platforms

• Application: C++, Java, Objective-C, Javascript, Qt QML
• Communication protocol: HTTP (RestFull API), SFTP
• Cloud: Private
• Back-end: Java, MySql
• Payments: Przelewy24 payment system