During the last several months I have been traveling between Australia, China and Italy, and working non-stop on a large RIA (Rich Internet Application) for Onsite Direct Global. After months of in-depth planning, design and development we have finally delivered version 1.0 of a revolutionary Real Estate Investment System that can easily handle things like e-commerce, user management, collaborative environments, advanced search, reporting, file upload and content management.

During 2010 the ODG project has been discontinued, but still it has been one of the most challenging projects I worked on.

I have been leading client side development for Pixlart’s RIA projects for a little over 1 year now, and I’d like to share some of the details and unique challenges I faced during development of this large RIA.

Onsite Direct Global’s new Real Estate Investment System (REIS) needed to accommodate a vast group of different user types (Buyers, Prospects, Referrers, Business Development Managers, Content Managers, Real Estate Developers, Builders and Onsite Direct Administrators). Creating an interface that enabled each group to easily accomplish their individual tasks was our first major challenge. To accomplish this task Bill Mackin (Pixlart’s director) spoke at length with Onsite Direct Global’s project manager Andy Armstrong to determine the exact needs of each user group. Based on that knowledge, Bill designed screens, interface elements, functionality and layouts that would accommodate each user in a way that would still allow for rapid development and deployment.

The Onsite Direct Global REIS is completely user-centric. There are no differences between the user and admin interfaces, except for the tools used to update content. Therefore an Onsite Direct Administrator can immediately see which part of the data he is working on.

A few of the hi-lighted features would include:
1. Ability to manage a complex chain of users, each capable of different actions and responsible for sub-groups of users.
2. A robust search feature allowing users to easily find, and save as favorites, the investment properties that best suit their needs.
3. A secure e-commerce gateway that allows Buyers to “RESERVE” properties by making a $1000 deposit payment.
4. A system to allow all necessary parties the ability to fill-out, save, track and mange numerous required documents and contracts.
5. A system to easily track property development and investment progress in real-time.
6. Reporting and statistics for Onsite Direct Administrators, Real Estate Developers, Builders, Business Development Managers and Referrers.
7. Robust content management features that are easy-to-use and help eliminate many data entry errors.

To address the project needs on the client side, I developed a set of visual components for the interface elements and a series of static classes for the re-usable features & functionality. We were able to utilize many items from our code/component library, but we also created several new classes to manage loading queues, file upload, property searches and user permissions (to name just a few).

Handling Pixlart’s server side development for this project is Brett O’Donnell. Brett has a vast amount of experience and expertise in PHP & MySQL. To handle the unique requirements of Onsite Direct Global’s new RIA, Brett chose to utilize CakePHP, a PHP framework that ties MySQL and AMFPHP (Flash Remoting for PHP) together. He has pushed AMFPHP quite far to meet our needs, but the powerful Flash Remoting features have made client-server communication extremely efficient and easy to maintain.

Here are a few screens from the finished RIA.

Unfortunately due to the nature of the RIA (it is a closed password protected system) and the Agreement in place between Pixlart & Onsite Direct Global I can only show a handful of public facing screens.

Login screen

Home Page - buyer

Here you can see all of the search controls, plus the 3 “Properties Of The Week”.

Home Page - admin

When logged in as an Onsite Direct Administrator, the toolbar on the left changes to present controls available only to admin users. As you can see, rolling over a “Property Of The Week”, I am able to change each of the displayed properties. This is a simple example of how the visual interface mixes viewing and editing features.

User Management

Depending on the type of user logged into the system, the user management features are slightly different. The simplest users can only update their own details.