Lignano.it

Lignano.it is one of the biggest projects I've ever worked.

It is a website were is possible to book your holiday in a popular touristic location in the north Italy (Lignano Sabbiadoro)

It involves thousands of accommodation providers, million of users, dozens of data providers, dozens of integrations with third party applications, 10 years of improvements and continuous learning.

The initial version of the product stated with almost a static website, quicker the website growth became exponential and lignano.it become a market leader.

The website offers a booking engine, listing pages, trips many other information that a tourist might need.

History

In 12 years the website had 4 restyling and a continuous improvement process that kept the website in a leader position for all that time.

From a static website, when dynamic pages arrived on internet, the choice was PHP and PostgreSQL.

Many versions of the website arrived, each of them was bringing new features and an every-day more sophisticated booking engine, more detailed pages and better user experience.

In the past there were no frameworks and really few opensource libraries. Every part had to be implemented.

Status

Nowadays Lignano.it evolved in a ecosystem of applications that provide a great user experience and a very reach set of tools for accommodation providers and advertisers.

It includes complex pricing models, complex availability and payment systems. Offers channel managers, custom websites, mobile apps and everything might be necessary to run a budiness based on short term tourism.

Some of the technologies used are:

• Linux: Linux is a fundamental building block of almost every component, from development to production.
• Symfony Framework: most of the recent applications are built using symfony. Some of the legacy applications are still running, some are wrapped into symfony applications and some are there to stay with the old PHP4 as it was in the past.
• Rest webservices: some applications expose REST webservices that allow to consume data (internally and externally)
• SOAP: Many integrations with third party providers use the SOAP technology (Open Travel Alliance as example)
• Redis: Lignano.it has to be fast, caching data and its invalidation is fundamental
• PostgreSQL: RostgreSQL has been a valid allied from the beginning, delivering great performance and exceptional consistency