The Platform
Arabestates platform is designed to make the property finding process simple and make the connection between sellers and buyers much easier. The platform provides the right tools for fast registration, properties refinement by specific criteria, application and getting in touch with the property owners. The key features are being described below.
Search
The search functionality is an important part one which combines itself possibility to search for properties by location as well as use some of faceting capabilities to filter down the results using such criteria as number of rooms, bedrooms, property type etc. From the technical standpoint, the implementation was done using Apache Solr technology, which is a powerful search indexing tool, which allows to index millions of records and return results in matter of seconds based on search criteria.
ApacheSolr was also used as a part of the platform caching mechanism in order to return the results and recommended suggestions in such a way leveraging high performance and stability to the platform itself.
Property Page
A very intuitive UI/UX was chosen in order to make the user easily fill-in the details for the property and publish it right away. Only strictly necessary information is being entered in the form and dynamic widgets take care of the all the rest to display on property item page, such as map, nearby places and company information. Technically wise, it is enough to enter only the address information and using Google API we were able to convert it into coordinates and display the map with relevant information. The Nearby Places are also pulled through Google Places API. All submissions for the property are being collected and shared with property owners for the further decisions. As the concept we used the simplicity and power of Google APIs to bring useful information to the audience.
Conclusion
Using Drupal Framework and power of ApacheSolr helped us build a robust property management platform which involves custom and complex features. As the infrastructure we used Amazon Web Services in order to guarantee the horizontal scaling and system stability hardware wise. A proper CDN implementation allowed us to leverage cached static pages and increase the performance and google page ranking results of the system. Drupal is a great Framework for corporate and custom built solutions which does not involve licensing fees on top and let you focus only on the final deliverable having the full ownership on it, easy scalable and backed up by Drupal Community.