THE PROJECT
The customer needs to rebuild an old platform that manages all Southern Africa Area Infrastructure projects that facilitate project data to public and private stakeholders.
The system contains 5 kinds of Public Infrastructure Project Data: Transport, Energy, Water, ICT, Meteorology and will visualize to a map all the project locations and will allow to users to filter data for Member States Countries, project stages, sectors and subsectors and other filters.
The platform includes a backoffice system where authenticated users could access full project information and propose to the system some project data update.
The project had been developed for SADC, an inter-governmental organization to further regional socio-economic cooperation and integration among 16 countries in southern Africa.
The following is a screenshot of the old platform that has been our starting point in which extract data:
OBJECTIVES
The final objective was to have a fully-fledged platform where different kinds of stakeholders could operate simultaneously.
Investors and public officials could access, retrieve, and download published information. Member States Officials could update their country-related projects with their current development updates. And finally, SADC Secretariat could validate and publish new projects reviews.
The key functionality points of the project required of the customer was:
- A front-end application with public limited data.
- User authentication with security policy.
- A backend application with specific roles to submit, validate and publish data;
- A revision engine between project versions;
- LDAP integration with intranet;
- A dynamic map with advanced filters and layers;
- PDF and Excel data exports.
THE EXECUTION
After a prior evaluation, we considered different technological stacks, and we concluded that Laravel 9.0 with VueJS was the best fit.
Laravel offers a good database management system to manage more than 35 tables and the relationship between data in an efficient and easy-maintainable way, and VueJS has the Javascript flexibility to be able to work with maps and GeoJSON data.
During the development, our developers follow all the best coding principles, SOLID and MVC with the Laravel 9.0 Standards to maintain a good codebase.
Once completed the development, we import all the infrastructure project data from the previous platform to the new one, and in this phase and set up the platform inside the customer intranet with LDAP integration.
Furthermore, Laravel offers many stable and reliable libraries, makes maintenance easier for web platforms, and is easy-deployable to any webserver with Nginx or Apache with PHP-FPM.
Once we completed the migration, with the staff of IMC Worldwide we provided 2 days of training and exercises to Member State and SADC Secretariat.