American Waterfront Properties
This website for American Waterfront Properties is one of those hard working sites that has a great deal of functionality built into it. The site was originally built by someone else and I came onboard to finish it up and work out the last of the kinks in it. It's written in PHP using a propietary, but well organized framework. The site features some very extensive capabilities including upload of real estate listings, paid registrations and a host of backend administrative capabilities.
The administrative capabilities of a site like this are very important to get right the first time. The webmaster must have the ability to maintain accounts and handle issues effectively or the site just isn't going to work well for the owners or for the users. If you're building a site like this, you'll want to make sure that the design and implementation of the site is flexible enough to allow it to evolve in both look and funtionality over several years. Sites like this are very expensive to build, so you'll want to get the most out of your original investment. This is one of the key reasons a really robust framework is so important. Servicability, security, and flexibility are the keys to a successful site like this one.
Kbluz Internet Radio
Kbluz Internet Radio is a blues music radio station that I operate. Over the last year and a half, I've developed, the website, the server side software that runs the station and the Flash based player for listening to the station. The website itself is currently constructed using WordPress, the broadcast server is a combination of PHP, AMFPHP and Server Side ActionScript (AS2). ActionScript is an ECMA type scripting language similar to JavaScript.
The station broadcasts 24/7 and averages about 36,000 listener units a month. I'm in the process of rebuilding the station website in CakePHP and adding some significant new features to it. Some of those new features will include jQuery plugins combined with a remote CodeIgniter 'JSON server', located on the broadcast server. This service will enable listeners to interactivley vote on the songs they're listening to. I've chosen CodeIgniter for the 'backend' sevices because it is signficantly faster and smaller than CakePHP. Speed will be very important considering the work load the 'backend server' encounters. I'm using CakePHP for the frontend because I'll be including a completely new music and merchandise shopping experience and I feel that will be a bit quicker to build in CakePHP utilizing the popular BakeSale package.