OAC Connect is a suite of applications that allows ‘Only About Children’ childcare centres to interact with the parents, and vice versa.
OAC Connect allows the childcare educators to upload text and images to parents; telling a story of what their child has done throughout the day. Parents can view this data in a ‘Facebook like’ style of news feed, or through a photo gallery which provides the images in chronological order.
Parents can also book a ‘casual day’ in the application, making the application a one-stop shop for parents and their Only About Children childcare needs.
Both iOS and Android applications are native, written in Swift 4 and Java respectively.
The server side application (CMS and API) is written in Laravel 5.6.
All the content provided by the organisations is provided via a CMS, which is then fed to the applications via a REST API, using the JSON format to transmit the data.
The infrastructure leverages AWS Elastic Beanstalk, using S3, RDS, and EC2 instances to host the server application. A load balancer instance is used with an AutoScaling group to ensure that the infrastructure is scalable and propagates or terminates EC2 instances depending on the incoming traffic.