P-Bay auction platform
A high-performance auction platform that allows real-time bidding for buyers in China? That could only have been Codana!
P-bay is one of the most important players for high quality pigeon auctions, with visitors from all over the world. Codana was given the opportunity to develop a brand new high-performance auction platform for p-bay and to help organize weekly auctions of high quality birds. To this day, we are constantly adding new functionalities to the platform to give buyers the best possible experience.
Performance boost with React
The previous P-Bay website was already built in Drupal but due to its success, a thorough refurbishment was more than welcome. Since a lot of users are logged in at peak times, the Drupal system could not cope and the speed was drastically reduced.
Also the Chinese users, of which there are quite a few, encoutered a lot of problems on the website with regard to site speed thanks to 'The Great Firewall of China', which caused some connections to be delayed a lot.
Laravel as a powerful PHP framework
In order to keep the general speed on the website and the course of the auctions running smoothly, we have opted for a custom web application platform based on Laravel.
We used Laravel as CMS and asynchronous job-handler to easily manage the supply of pigeon data and auctions, the users, news items and pages. For the front-end, we used React, the Javascript framework that makes it easy to assemble dynamic web applications. In this way, we were able to achieve a considerable boost in terms of browser performance.
Better for mobile
When the previous version of the website was created, the entire mobile Internet world quite modest. But Codana creates web applications that work equally well on Desktop and Mobile. So we got the time to examine and improve the compatibility of mobile devices in order to respond to current technologies. In China in particular, more and more people are visiting the website via their smartphones, making the importance of a well-functioning mobile site a clear necessity. We provided a fast mobile version, so that every pigeon enthousiast can keep an eye on the latest auctions and deals from anywhere in the world.
High performance capability with PHP, Javascript and CDN
P-Bay is first and foremost an auction site, where it is very important that everything runs in real time. For this we have used websockets. Thanks to this advanced technique, it is possible to open an interactive connection between the server and the user's browser. As soon as someone makes a bid, this will be adjusted in real time on the user's page, without the user having to refresh the page. This way, everyone always gets the most recent information and updates, without any manual effort from the user.
Also, the hosting was also provided by Calibrate. In the beginning we had to wait and see if the Chinese users would also be able to use the new website easily. After the go-live, we have already implemented optimisations in this area. We chose to place Cloudflare as an extra performance, caching and security layer for the website. The website worked very smoothly without Cloudflare, but from China there were noticeable delays at DNS level. Cloudflare will handle the DNS requests more efficiently and as Content Delivery Network (CDN) ensures that images, javascript files and API calls are delivered as optimally as possible based on the location of the visitor.
Contact us
Do you also need a web platform that requires high performance? Or do you like to talk about another web application? In any case, we are ready for it!