Kontain.com is a service that allows you to easily share media with friends and family. As a technical lead, my main responsibility was to head a team of front end developers from project inception through launch. My goals were to establish code standards, develop an efficient team workflow and maintain a high level of code quality. The result was a modular and optimized platform with a high level of code reuse.
I developed a workflow that allowed each developer to work independently on their own components. When a component is updated, a build script merges the changes into every location the component appears. This allows a high level of efficiency with no manual updates.
Each component of the site was also designed to be self contained. This architecture allows for highly reusable components, while loading only the sprites, styles and scripts that are needed.
Apache Wicket was used as our presentation layer. Because Wicket provides a layer of Ajax abstraction, I developed a light JavaScript framework that allowed our web developers to inject custom code into each phase of Wicket's Ajax request cycle. This allowed our developers to write custom validation and DHTML, while maximizing the use of Wicket's Ajax framework.
The site features three levels of CSS and Javascript: global, page and component. This pattern ensures only the image and script assets that are required for any particular page are loaded. To further boost performance, a compression routine was included in the site's deploy script. The script merges page files to minimize http requests.
Kontain was a finalist at the Adobe Max Awards in the category of "Social Computing".
