Scan To BIM
Scan To BIM is a company in the construction industry that develops Autodesk Revit add-in which gets downloaded to the workstation and helps users convert a 3D point cloud to a CAD model.
BACKGROUND & GOALS
The client wanted an eCommerce website where users could sign up for a recurring license. They also wanted to create fast APIs that could integrate with their desktop application to validate the license. The desktop application would ping the website to get the license information every 10 minutes. The APIs could never go down as otherwise the desktop application would stop working. This had to be done while minimizing the hosting cost.
SOLUTION
Since Drupal 8 Commerce was still in alpha and their recurring subscription module wasn't completely developed yet, we turned to WooCommerce. We used the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin for the recurring subscription functionality. For interfacing with the desktop application, the easiest way was to create REST APIs in Wordpress. The APIs had to be accessible 100% of time which means that we needed redundant servers. But this goal was in direct conflict with the goal of minimizing the hosting cost. So instead of creating Wordpress-based REST APIs, we created them using Google Cloud Functions that got the license information from the database directly. We did configure the database in master-slave mode but we didn't need to have a redundant server for the website.
RESULTS
The client was extremely glad that we could achieve their requirements while minimizing their hosting cost. In fact, for the first year, the whole separated operated just using the free credits that Google Cloud provides on joining.
We are impressed by the work that Red Crackle did for us. We'll definitely contact Red Crackle again for any future work.
