restauracie.sk

restauracie.sk was the first project we delivered as the redByte team. It began as our own initiative, and we later partnered with the media house Petit Press (publisher of the SME daily). The goal was to build a comprehensive online gastro portal that would help restaurant-goers better gauge the quality and offering of individual venues. At the core of the system was a restaurant database, around which the application’s other modules were built. The system was split into a public part and an internal part.

The public part — aimed at the general public — offered extensive options for searching restaurants and then rating them. Particularly useful was the interactive restaurant map, which gave users a unique way to find the venue that suited them best. For authentication we integrated with Facebook and Google OAuth2. Another important feature was the publishing of news, highlights and articles from the Slovak and international gastro sector, which we handled through our own CMS.

The internal part covered administration of the portal, including the sales and marketing agenda. It was a multi-user system with a broad set of roles and permissions. It supported the full workload of the sales and marketing team — from preparing materials and evaluating sales reps to extensive sales statistics. It made up the larger and more complex part of the restauracie.sk system.

Analysis

From the start of the project we handled both the domain and technical analysis ourselves. This project shaped us significantly in this regard — it taught us to think about software not only within the bounds of the analysis we were handed, but also in terms of the overall value delivered to the client.

Solution

The software solution was built on a stack of Java, Spring, Hibernate and PostgreSQL, complemented by purpose-built solutions for specific problems. The client side was implemented with the Apache Wicket framework, combined with various jQuery plugins.

restauracie.sk reached beyond Central Europe — we delivered an adapted version to Germany for the Rheinische Post publishing house and to the Czech Republic for the MAFRA media house. The project had to be adapted for the German and Czech markets, so the delivery also included extensive reworking of the original Slovak version, from significant changes to the graphics and layout through to integration with a proprietary single sign-on solution.