It's about SeleraKita technology

While approaching the release of my culinary website for Indonesian market, SeleraKita, I want to deal some of the technology used by it. As SeleraKita, we position ourself as service provider for people who wants to search for their culinary needs in a fast manner. We aim to provide comprehensive database of food around Jakarta initially, and later on targeting the whole indonesia. We hope the support of Jakarta citizen who are food-savvy to enrich our database by writing articles for us. This information will go back to the citizen, and solely used to make our service better for the sake of our user.

By leveraging current technology, we try to build an environment where it can scale up good in the future. As the first consideration, our server is located in Singapore, which is the closest internet landing point to Indonesia. We have chosen a service provide in Singapore because of their competitive price, and their proven support. If the demand increase in the future, we planned to locate the server back to the home country, Indonesia. Having a close landing point means that selerakita page will load faster.

Internet speed in Indonesia is also a concern. Jakarta is well exposed by broadband connection, but there is still noticeable amount of dial up connection user. Shared connection in internet cafe also not work as fast as a private broadband connection. we aim to provide a website where user which use dial up can access within time window less than 20 seconds at max. Having this target, we implement server side archiving of content before being sent to your browser. By archiving the content, a smaller package can be sent to you, effecting on a faster load of the web page.

SeleraKita website is fully javascript driven, using professional packages to drive its functionality. The same packages have been used by Google, Apple, and NASA to power its website, which are Prototype and Scriptaculous library. The decision to use javascript is to evade the excessive usage of Flash content. Scriptaculous provides animation framework which give the user a rich user interface experience. We will keep on working iteratively to make the user experience better in SeleraKita website.

SeleraKita has a search engine capable to analyze the current trend on the market. The result of the search will be given in a sorted order from the most famous to less famous location. All thanks to KulinerKita algorithm which runs every day to analyze the data of our user behavior. The searchengine is implemented by using Stored Procedure in MySQL database to attain the highest query speed possible. The reason that stored procedure is chosen is because we can gain the favor in speed if we bring the search process closer to the heart of the operation, MySQL itself by using the built in SQL programming language. Through time, we will keep improving the performance of the search engine so it can be as blazing fast as Google.

To speed up the building process of the website, we leverage industry standard PHP framework, Symfony. By using Symfony, Selerakita can build its website within time span of 30 days. The coding is supported by Eclipse IDE using various plug in for its Database modelling, Clay, and script editor, YAML. Symfony make use of Propel, capable of generating a fast way to access the database while eliminating the header of writing too much SQL query.

In our core, we are on the same time service-oriented team as well as technological team. we tried to deliver the solution using the most efficient technology there is. And of course the aim is better user experience for our user. In the end, no matter how advance our technology and how much we have spent, our users are the ones we serve. Within our business model, we would like to invite the user to take part in the process of inventing SeleraKita website. We are welcome for any suggestion through our community forum in Facebook and Friendster. If we think that the community of the users have good idea, we will answer their challenge by implementing it.

Stay tune for the launch on 16 July!!!! Around that date, I will release the second iteration plan to make SeleraKita better, such as mobile version, and the rest is surprise... ;)