buildabrand.com

The beta battle : Pac Man versus the magic coffee beans!

By Dave Shanley on December 8, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Keywords Announcements, Technology and tagged Beta, build, buildabrand, code, Technology.

It has been a while since we were announced on Techcrunch and yes, we are still in closed beta. Here’s a new peek into the engine behind buildabrand and why we haven’t opened the doors just yet…My posts have been a bit quiet for a while because I’ve had my sleeves rolled up and my arms soaked to the elbow in engine oil. All metaphorically of course, buildabrand doesn’t run on petrochemicals! Actually, we run on magic coffee beans!

Buildabrand is complicated. In fact, it’s very complicated! To give an example; we used quite a lot of JavaScript on the site interface to make the brand building experience clean and swift. Some people have even assumed that we were using Flash because of the fluid interactivity. There are currently over 5,071 lines of custom JavaScript used in our interface. Just to give you some perspective; you can write JavaScript versions of classic arcade games like Pac-Man and Tetris in less than 400 lines!

There might be some Finnish super hackers out there laughing at 5k lines of JavaScript code, but this is just the start of the story! We have used a lot of different components to build different tools and services. Our architecture is primarily Java based. Naturally that meant lots of pure Java code. As a matter of fact, right now there are 35,231 lines of pure Java code in our closed beta.

On top of all that code we have over 300 different configuration, language, and visual display files. They contain: 12,356 lines of HTML/JSP, 1,358 lines of XML and 6,185 line of CSS / XSL. So as you can see, it is now a case of making sure that 35k+ lines of Java, 5k+ lines of JavaScript and all our configurations, content and display code work together. It also means making sure it works in your browser and that you get a fluid experience.

For a comparison, lets take a look at the source code statistics for the worlds favorite web browser Firefox: http://www.ohloh.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest.

As you can see, the scale of the inner workings of builabrand are not all that different to something like Firefox!

Another important fact to mention is that we don’t have a large team of developers (yet). We are still only a small team. I have personally tried to grow more arms so we can ramp up our products and features quicker, but no matter how much glow in the dark paint I eat – it just won’t happen.

Since our Techcrunch article we have added over 9,000 lines of Java to the project, new features, new enhancements, and a complete e-commerce system (not running in the closed beta). However, I can safely say that it’s almost ready! Our closed beta testers are rolling in now and the last few quirks will be worked out. We’re be throwing open the doors to everyone very soon!

If you have any questions about the technology or if you would like our advice with your own architecture, then give me a shout at hellodave@buildabrand.com.

Cheerio for now,

- Dave