inside the drakkar

www.mobilevikings.com

Inside the Drakkarthe making of Mobile Vikings

by Gert, Ingo & Jef


Mobile Vikings facts• Mobile operator since Feb 1, 2009

• Started with 1000 users and has grown since

• 2500 invitation requests

• 6350 total lines of Python code

• Total usage of 27,05 GiB used last month


Overview

•Technology•Website•Backend


Technology stack•Django 1.0

• Apache 2

•MySQL 5

• Server


Django•What?

•Web framework encouraging DRY-principle

• Python

•Model-Template-View (MVC-like)

• Focus on reusability

•More info: djangoproject.com


Server•One virtualized machine

• Plenty of room for scaling

•Debian


Website philosophyEverything via the web

•Become a customer

•Get your SIM card

• Top-ups (PayPal, …)

•Realtime call history

• Important information (SIM number, PUK, credit balance, SMS alerts)


Website philosophy (2)Feedback == important!

•We strive to create a better user experience…

•… so give us your feedback!

•[email protected]


Backend•Connection to BASE

• SIM management

•Bundles

• Top-ups

•Helpdesk

• SMS alerts (upcoming feature)


Django and Mobile Vikings• Allows us to create reliable, complex yet

maintainable web applications and sites in no time

• Pretty URL’s (E.g. /myviking/credit/)

• Makes use of Python, which is more explicit; this gives clarity. Existing code has an easy learning curve.

• Powerful templating system with inheritance

• Built-in support for internationalization


Django and Mobile Vikings (2)• Django helped us to cope with constantly changing

situations (many new features, data model changes, complete rewrites of parts)

• Abstraction to external API’s

• E.g. support for multiple SMS gateways

• Easy and fast deployment

• Supports iterative development

• Clean, but readable code


Clean code

Models define:• Database tables• Object-Relational Mapper• HTML forms (including basic validation)• a part of the REST API

Our SIM model:


Made with Django• mobilevikings.com

• glowe.org

• gloweme.com

• …


Questions?

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