Project - Real Estate MLS Listings Portal

Overview:
The objective of this project is to provide a new construction listing service for Florida with basic and premium subscription. The key sources of differentiation and preference will be comprehensive listings, convenient map based search and the friendly affiliate program. This service will be extended to some more states in US as a next step.

In this document we have provided the feature list and technology architecture overview for this MLS portal.

Feature List

The proposed application will be used by 8 types of users and the features are listed below for each user type

Not in scope items

• CRM related features includingsales force and marketing automation are not in scope of work
• No integration with any ERP or CRMpackage or proprietary application is envisaged in this proposal
• No integration with accounting orPeachtree or QuickBooks or Quicken is included in scope of work
• SSL certificate is proposed butprovision of client security certificates for two way SSL is not inscope
• AJAX will be used where-everappropriate to improve user experience but usage of Java applets isnot included
• No external API integration is envisaged beyond the integration to merchant gateway for credit cardpayment processing
• No device integration with OCR /Optical character recognition device or any external device like alabel printer or bar code scanner or info-dot reader or credit cardswipe machine or biometric identification devices is included inscope

Technology Architecture
The proposed application will be programmed in web architecture using PHP 5 and MY SQL 5 as RDBMS (LAMP architecture). Application architecture will be centralized for easy manageability. Application will be optimized for Internet Explorer 6+ but HTML 4 compliance will be preserved to ensure cross browser compatibility with other common browsers like Firefox, Safari and Netscape Navigator.
Cross browser compatibility is largely ensured through use of XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4 compliance. All application testing will be done in Firefox which has a more restrictive implementation of HTML / JavaScript and this ensures that it runs well in IE browsers too. Any cross browser issues will be debugged if they arise during module testing. Optimistic locking will be used in database operations to improve concurrent user performance. Extensive use of stored procedures will ease network traffic and database performance. The project developed in the LAMP environment. The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software programs, commonly open source programs, used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers. The original expansion is as follows: Linux, referring to the operating system; Apache, the Web server; MySQL, the database management system (or database server); PHP, the programming language. Linux utilizes the latest stable kernel version. The underlying ext3 file system is a well-proven technology for both rapid recovery and protecting the integrity of the data on the server. Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.
MySQL database, another robust open source tool that has revolutionized the way web pages, graphics, tables, and data sets of all sorts are served up on the web. Web-based databases in general, and MySQL in particular, have made it possible to build and present fully dynamic websites, capable of presenting content in real time. They have also helped to further the goal of separating content from formatting, speeding the load time of sites while making them far more manageable than in the past. PHP has, in just a few short years, become one of the predominant scripting languages on the web. With a relatively easy syntax and open source licensing, webmasters and developers around the world have migrated to PHP from the more difficult and syntactically challenging scripting languages like Perl.
PEAR coding standards were used throughout the application.