Case Study: Skyblox

BACKGROUND

SkyBlox (http://www.skyblox.com) is a wireless company founded by former leaders of Earthlink’s Wi-Fi business unit. SkyBlox delivers community-based information as a portal over aggregated local Wi-Fi hotspots.

SkyBlox’s business goal is to build connections, online, between businesses, residents and visitors within neighborhoods in any city. The concept is driven by the belief that local businesses have relied upon the old sandwich board, and other offline marketing vehicles, for too long. With SkyBlox, businesses will be able to post real-time announcements that reach tens of thousands of neighborhoods and visitors, or become a SkyBlox Wi-Fi hotspot, with a location-aware system that brands the hotspot homepage – the page users see when they access free wireless Internet access in the neighborhood – as their own.

CHALLENGE

SkyBlox developed its business case in 2007 and needed a Web and application development partner to build its portal. The company, due to being a start-up, had minimal technical resources and needed to find a resource that could build the application for them for a reasonable cost.

SkyBlox did not have a preference for the technology platform, but had two requests: first, it wanted an application that could be used for its beta test; and secondly, that it could be scaled across hundreds of communities and up to millions of concurrent users as the business grew. The company found that most development firms would not be able to develop its application within its budget and timeframe, based on the complexity behind building rich Internet applications. Vendors all required UI developers, server-side programmers, project managers, QA testers and additional team members – all contributing to a high cost of development and long lead times on developing the solution.

SkyBlox was frustrated by the apparent complexity behind developing its application and began looking for alternatives. Quickly SkyBlox learned about a new RIA development platform and methodology created by Appcelerator that might provide the right mix of speed, quality and cost the founders were looking for.

SOLUTION

SkyBlox met with the Appcelerator team and learned the company had been formed to solve the exact challenge facing the company – the need to rapidly develop rich Internet applications without all the bottlenecks and complexities of traditional development tools and processes. SkyBlox ultimately selected Appcelerator as its partner and began development in February 2008.

Appcelerator provided SkyBlox with its Interactive Use Case development – its technology-enabled agile development process designed to improve both speed and quality of the development process. Rather than spend months using a process-intensive development approach, Appcelerator helped SkyBlox begin development immediately using Interactive Use Cases.

“I’m surprised more organizations aren’t developing applications this way,” said David Payne, co-founder and CEO of SkyBlox. “It doesn’t make sense to spend months planning the application, when you have no idea how users will interact with the UI. Appcelerator was the only firm solution that would enable us to start building the UI as step one.”

Using the Interactive Use Case approach and the Appcelerator Platform, SkyBlox was able to begin developing a fully-functioning RIA prototype without needing server developers. Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language enabled developers familiar with HTML and CSS to begin mocking up the UI. This key feature is made possible by Appcelerator’s message-oriented architecture – which enables an almost full decoupling of the user interface from the application’s services. With the Appcelerator architecture, SkyBlox could develop its UI independent from its services – linking the two by a lightweight message interface.

Using Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case methodology, the SkyBlox development team was able to create “mock services” within the UI – services that would simulate the actual performance of the application in deployment. Mock services handle remote service requests and responses, but reside in the browser – the application has no knowledge of the location of the services it consumes. The capabilities – unique to Appcelerator’s architecture and methodology – would enable SkyBlox to develop a fully-functional UI prototype that was 100% reusable in the final application.

OUTCOME

Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case approach enabled SkyBlox to develop its application in six weeks – compared to estimates of six months for other alternatives. Once the development team finalized the UI prototype, it was able to immediately deploy the application on Ruby on Rails and launch the beta version of its solution.

“Appcelerator’s Interactive Use Case approach enabled us to use HTML developers to build out the UI, without needing to engage server programmers. This helped us gain natural efficiencies in the development process – and also to control our development costs to the absolute minimum,” adds Payne. “Coming from an environment where simple iterations could take six months to work through the internal processes and find their way into the application, moving to a model that supports rapid iterations made the most sense for SkyBlox.”

SkyBlox recently completed a one-month beta test within the Virginia-Highland neighborhood in Atlanta. The company has since added 10 more communities to its SkyBlox platform and anticipates continuing its rapid growth for the remainder of the year.