Excess baggage handling company, U-bag.com, has employed Macromedia`s ColdFusion MX technology to drive its e-commerce-enabled Web presence.
The company offers airlines, travel agents and passengers an innovative quoting service for transporting excess luggage as unaccompanied baggage and identified the need for a solution that would enhance the design of its Web site and provide a quick and easily confirmed quotation facility to customers.
According to Simon Lavarack, Managing Director of Air Express Products, the exclusive agent in SA for U-bag.com, the solution had to incorporate a real-time card payment facility and had to comfortably handle the ongoing queries based on dynamic imported pricing structures from third-parties.
"Staff had to be able to easily manage orders covering routes used between airports and cities around the world based on the best possible price."
Macromedia`s ColdFusion MX, available locally through distributor, Dax Data, fulfilled all the criteria and was selected as the development platform of choice. U-bag.com commissioned Entelligence, a Web development solutions company based in Cape Town, for the entire project.
"In short, we were looking for a single, easy-to-use content management and reporting system that could be developed and implemented quickly. ColdFusion MX as an underlying technology for U-bag.com does just that," Lavarack says.
Sean Riley, MD at Entelligence, says that at the backend, the service that U-bag offers is quite complex, particularly with regards to its pricing structures.
"Customers can choose from a large number of configuration options. Pricing changes per route and is based on options such as door-to-door, airport-to-door, or vice versa," he says.
"Because of the varying size and numbers of items, the back-end system has to be dynamic, generating changing pricing structures that are based on special offers and keep track of inflation."
All of these requirements had to be integrated into a single order management system, which allows U-bag.com to process and track the shipments worldwide.
"ColdFusion MX was easily the technology of choice. It is well suited to developing dynamic Web sites and provides a stable platform for further enhancements," Riley says.
"A key challenge was to find a means of effectively importing the data into the database in an automated way. Not a simple task as the data runs and changes in real-time and, naturally, the format varies for every airline or bag handling service," he says.
Entelligence used ColdFusion Components to create self-documenting, reusable application components callable from CFML pages, Macromedia Flash, or to be applied as Web services.
ColdFusion`s Web Services functionality was also used to integrate external Web services into applications, and to publish Web services using a standards-based Web services engine.
To increase user productivity, Entelligence developed image-manipulating software, using ColdFusion technology, to optimise uploaded images without any technical knowledge of image manipulation.
Commenting on the implementation, Jeremy Matthews, MD of Dax Data, says: "The entire site was developed in less than a month and clearly demonstrates the rapid application development capabilities, cost-effectiveness as well as processing power of ColdFusion MX.
"Using the proven tag-based scripting and built-in services in ColdFusion MX, Web application developers can easily harness the power of the Java platform without complexity," says Matthews.
The result, says Lavarack, is that customers now enjoy a 24/7 online service that is fast and easy to navigate thanks to the superior performance and reliability of the underlying platform.
"Feedback from both customers and our staff has been extremely positive," Lavarack concludes.
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