The customer is a German-based web-development company, specialized in a wide range of e-commerce solutions development. The concept of the project was to create a dating portal that facilitates seeking new contacts and communicating with friends. To gain popularity and maintain high traffic rate, the solution was supposed to be attractive, convenient and user-friendly, and to provide various tools for seeking and maintaining new contacts.

The prior-to-development activities resulted in creation of the specification and HTML-prototype that demonstrated system functionality and visual solution.

The solution contains all the essential functionality to make it popular among users. Main features of the system are as follows:

• Quick registration - just a few fields have to be filled in;
• Easy profile maintenance and update - a user decides himself what information he wants others to see;
• Multimedia data - a capability to view video and listen to audio files attached to a profile;
• Quick and advanced search - a capability to search contacts either by a single parameter or by a full list of them, search customization by saving a set of important parameters;
• Favorites - an ability to save a list of friends, as well as a "black list";
• Message box - internal communication system enables to send internal messages, similar to regular emails. Each user has an inbox with constant storage of income messages, drafts and sent items folders;
• Instant messenger - users have an ability to chat online using the instant messenger by choosing an interlocutor and initiating a chat with him. A user can also invite friends from his favorites list;
• Video chat - users can download and install software that enables to organize a video conference.

The technical architecture of the solution is a realization of a three-tier model. Three layers of the system are business logic, the presentation layer and the database layer. Such division provides independent working of design group and programmers in the project team. The architecture framework developed is based on the well-known Apache Struts Framework (for the first two tiers), but was improved for more usability and upgraded with application specific architecture features.

Technologies used: Apache Struts 1.1, JDK 1.4.1, Java Servlet 2.3, JSP 1.2, Java, JavaScript, HTML, MySQL 2.23, Apache Tomcat 4.1, RUP, MS Project 2002.

Efforts: 7 man-months.