Overview
Overall it was an ongoing effort because it was maintenance and monthly updates over 2 years. Everything required a meticulous attention for detail because both the back-end and front-end were complex implementations. On every change and fix we had to make sure both the Flash version and HTML fallback of the front-end UI were affected and still work correctly.
Tech stack
The Buitoni.com website was an existing platform we inherited when we acquired Nestlè as a client. The back end side was build in .NET with Entity Framework and running on IIS7, the front-end side had the layouts built in HTML but the main content areas were Flash components.
Considering most of the projects we had were based on PHP, we were running our development tools on MacOS and because Buitoni.com was running on .NET, a great help were Virtual Machines based on Windows that allowed us to run directly the development environment on our local MacOS machines. As front end team we were working closely with the back end team.
Challenges
Some of the challenges came because we didn’t build the original Flash components, so we were delegated also to go through a series of major bugs of Flash communication with the DB. Using HTTP request monitor (Charles Web Debugger Proxy app) to debug transaction between Action Script and DB.
In some instances we had to fix also Action Script animations glitches.