Case Study: Enterprise Architecture

I'd like to announce that one of my customers has added some more client's of their own. Their business is growing well in this down economy. Its another example of how entrepreneurs can thrive in a recession.

They are an Internet startup focused on the green movement. I've listed them as one of our case studies at Strongback Consulting. They offer electronic receipt management to retailers and electronic receipt organization for retail customers.

Retail customers receive their receipts via email rather than printed out thus saving paper, ink and all the energy required to generate the paper and ink. The company is TransactionTree™ and their site is http://www.nomopaper.com

This site is a great study in how good UI design makes other features go so much better. The site is built in Java using Apache Struts2, Spring 2, and Apache Tiles. The presentation is entirely abstracted out from the content giving the following benefits:

• The branding of the site can easily be swapped out with out having to change out the content. This ideal in the case of Internet startups which often either change the branding to better match the evolving audience (i.e. Facebook, CNN.com, etc), or they are acquired or they acquire a competitor.
  
• The content can be written and delivered without worrying about markup, making content generation much easier for the authors.
  
• Smaller content means web browsers that turn off CSS can read and navigate the entire site without additional work (think older Blackberries, Windows Mobile, etc.).

Another feature of this site is that we use many CSS features that are supported by the latest browsers, but for browser that do not support them, the content is rendered in a less flashy, but appealing way. This is called graceful degradation (or gradual enhancement depending up on how you look at it). On all the JSP's we use XHTML strict DTD's. In this day and age there is no reason to be sloppy. The XHTML also means that the content is fully XML compliant which also means it can be used in other applications as content.

If you have a moment check out their site. Its something we are quite proud of. Enjoy.