OAC Connect

Developed in 2018 | Only About Children

Project Briefing

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.




Technical Details

iOS

  • The iOS application was written natively in Swift 4, programatically drawing the UI with Autolayout Constraints.
  • CocoaPods was used for the dependency manager.

Android

  • The Android application was written natively mostly in Java, with newer parts of the application being written in Kotlin.

Backend

  • The server side application (CMS and API) was 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, Amazon Glacier, 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.



Screenshots




Notes

Since leaving OAC, OAC Connect has since been decommissioned.