TicketMates Australia – Case Study

TicketMates

Ben Manns is the director of TicketMates Australia, a growing tourism business situated in the heart of the Gold Coast in Queensland. If you've ever purchased a tour or theme park ticket through a resort or a tourist information kiosk, chances are they used the TicketMates service to facilitate the transaction.

We saw a need in the tourism industry to facilitate brokering of ticket sales between tour operators and resellers.

Says Manns

Ticket resellers benefit from having one single location from which they can locate and sell tickets for their customers, and tour operators benefit through an expanded their client base.

Needless to say, the TicketMates website is critical to the company's business model.

If our website is down or not operating, we're losing money, so reliability is essential.

But even more important to us is the need to expand the website to take advantage of new opportunities in the tourism industry. And that's where we started to run into problems with the old site.

Software Projects' Involvement

In late 2007, the company approached Brisbane-based Software Projects to assess their website and recommend solutions.

Software Projects identified a common scenario, where a website has been developed using a mix of technologies; has evolved a little bit at a time usually by different people and skill levels.

After a while, the code just becomes too complex to maintain easily. The smallest change in one part of the system can break a seemingly unrelated feature elsewhere.

Technical Requirements

SP's review identified some key technical requirements:

• The TicketMates business was growing and the system needed to cater for a larger user base over the coming years.
• The system would need to easily interface with a growing number of standards-based services becoming available on the Internet.
• New features needed to be added quickly and without affecting the overall complexity of the system.

The TicketMates organisation had reached the point where their business required an enterprise solution that would scale with the growing business.

SP and TicketMates worked together to review a number of different technology options, and chose Java Enterprise Edition as the most appropriate platform for future development.

With this strategy in place, SP prepared a project plan that involved re-implementing key components of the system in a series of stages. Emphasis was on rapid development while minimising technical risk.

One interesting technology direction was the use of Groovy and Grails for a significant amount of the web user interface code. Software Projects has a background in Java, Ruby and Rails, and the Groovy/Grails combination provided the rapid development capability of Ruby on Rails, along with the maturity and enterprise capabilities of Java Enterprise Edition.

Go Live

The new system went live in July 2008 with relatively few problems.

Groovy/Grails is relatively new and there were some early teething problems, but we are very happy with the end result.

says John Jeffery, SP's technical lead for the Ticketmates project.

And Manns is happy too.

We're rapt in the new system. The J2EE rewrite has allowed us to enter new market segments such as direct to public sales. That would have been virtually impossible with the old system.

The new website is also much faster and the guys are now able to turn around changes and new features in hours rather than days.

TicketMates recently won a major contract to deliver ticketing services to the Stella Hospitality Group.

Without doubt, rewriting the website in Java EE has been a key part to our becoming the market leader.

says Manns

Technology will be the key to success in the tourism industry for the future and I'm confident that we are now well positioned to take full advantage of new opportunities.

Technology Highlights

• Code written in Java Enterprise Edition;
• Groovy / Grails (incorporating Hibernate and Spring);
• MySQL;
• iText (for PDF reports);
• Hudson Continuous Integration;
• Canoo Webtest;
• Cobertura Code Coverage Testing; and
• JUnit Unit Testing;