Evolution | Booking Engine

Evolution Distribution offers, amongst other services, GDS (global distribution system) connectivity, channel management and call centre reservations management to the hotel industry.

Over the course of several years being involved in various projects for Evolution Distribution, I’ve worked within a team using both a .Net, Windows and php, Linux environment.

Two of the major projects we worked on were a Booking Engine and an associated Theme generator.

Booking Engine

The booking engine (BE) is sold as software as a service and, at the time of build, had to be compatible with IE7 and thus was not made fully responsive at the time it was built. As a mobile and tablet offering, a server side detect redirects a user to a mobile specific version. The mobile offering was built using the same JSON API data, but using jQuery Mobile to drive the front end.

The desktop version of the BE was built on all bespoke HTML, CSS and JavaScript, working closely with backend developers to shape and plan the JSON API data structure to deliver data to the frontend in the most efficient way possible. For example, country names were codified and had a separate lookup list on the client side to reduce the response size sent to the browser. In addition to this, the server had gzip enabled to further reduce the payload size.

As the site caters for a global client base, the content was optimised to be delivered by a CDN (Rackspace) with minimal dynamic content delivered from the source server.

The frontend also makes use of CDN JavaScript delivery by loading content in parallel from Google Hosted Libraries and Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network