Founded by web professionals passionate about eCalendars, Timejust is a start-up that designs services aimed at making calendars smarter and time management easier.

The alpha version of Timejust can be described as an event planning and personal organization service that integrates multiple web services, including calendars, public transportation, and maps. This version is only available for journeys in the Paris area and to a limited group of registered users.

CHALLENGES

Business challenges

To launch this innovative service, Timejust was facing many challenges, chief amongst them:

• Providing a usable service to a limited user-test group
• Defining a technical basis prefiguring the architecture for future versions
• Validating the feasibility of the project’s key functionalities and the relevance of the service’s architectural principles
• Assessing the feasibility constraints
• Bringing a high-quality finish to an existing functional prototype

Project Challenges

Given the high complexity level of the project, our team faced multiple challenges:

• Integrating multiple external services like RATP, SNCF and maps, with various technologies and technical interfaces
• Realizing the technical integration of the calendaring system chosen for the alpha version
• Creating a constraint calculation engine for journeys, calculators, and more
• Building a responsive system for handling as quickly as possible the full range of operations: fetching calendar events, suggesting destinations, calculating routes for several transportation modes, and finally writing them into the calendar
• Integrating payment and affiliation systems

RESULTS

• af83 built an architecture that allows to reduce the dependencies between the different components of the application in order to create a solid foundation. In addition, this allows for the integration of various services that are not originally designed to work together. This independence between the components also allows the replacement of any of the bricks found unsuitable for the next steps of the project.
• Our team tackled the key issue of the semantic analysis of a calendar to successfully determine which route is the most relevant for a particular user, depending on time of day, next planned events, known addresses, and more.
• The asynchronous system we built enables Timejust to offer highly responsive interfaces to their end users, with a quick and smooth display of the information as soon as it’s processed by the server.

After a few months in alpha stage, the platform is currently available in public beta.