Online communities

Online communities have rapidly grown over the past few years to represent a wide range of interests served through their Internet web sites. One such site, ELLEgirl.com, is aimed at reaching out to young women between the ages of 16 to 20 years of age. ELLEgirl.com, an Alloy company, is a fashion brand authority connecting millions of teens worldwide with the hottest fashion trends, beauty advice, fun content, and the ability to win prizes. It has grown to be one of the top U.S. teen communities on the Internet today. Recently, ELLEgirl.com undertook a broad-based architectural assessment to focus on performance, scalability, high availability, and longevity.

The Solution

The ELLEgirl.com application software infrastructure is made up of Apache, Tomcat, OJB, OpenCMS, MySQL , and Struts. Within this infrastructure and application were unintentionally retained objects causing memory issues effecting the application performance and longevity. ELLEgirl.com requires consistent performance and 24/7 availability, so the memory concerns required immediate attention with a comprehensive solution.

The primary goal of the architectural assessment was to determine best practices for problem resolutions, obtain expert advice on specific issues, achieve broad knowledge transfer and assess level of effort & risk related to any recommendations. Working closely with the Alloy IT team, 10x Software was asked to provide an independent, unbiased assessment of the existing architecture and software infrastructure.

According to Bob Bell, Chief Technology Officer of Alloy, "10x Software has proven time and again to have the depth of industry expertise and practical hands-on experience we can rely upon to provide unbiased guidance and assistance.” He continued, “Alloy has made a conscious decision to leverage open source technologies to help control costs and increase quality; companies like 10x Software provide key assets towards helping us execute this decision."

Don Vines, EVP of Technology for 10x Software, headed the project team working directly with the Alloy IT group. The assessment process involved an in-depth, hands-on review of the architecture, J2EE patterns, configuration and implementation. “Our assessment process is designed to focus on areas critical to the success of an application,” commented Don, “then we work with the team to help them tune and optimize for the characteristics most important for their success.” 10x Software provides a multi-stage process for creating, migrating and evaluating mission-critical applications that use advanced software technologies and open source software solutions.