Technology overview

In a nutshell, it is a web application framework, not unlike some others you might have heard of. However, the Trikoder framework has a bundle of specific additions, which allows us to deliver top of the line applications in different business environments, such as portals, classifieds or webshops, without sacrificing the general purpose and ability to develop rapidly any class of high-performance web applications.

From the technical standpoint, the Trikoder framework is an MVC framework developed in PHP 5, it is fully object oriented and has been tried and tested using MySQL and PostgreSQL, but it is not bound to any specific database. It supports rapid development features such as automatic data layer generation and automatic administration interfaces. It also features a fully fledged extension and component systems, making code reutilization and system design almost an effortless process.

All applications we have developed, no matter how different from one another, are based on the Trikoder framework. The same technology platform powers the unorthodox, original scroll-less news portal 24sata.hr that has been proclaimed one of the top 5 world news portals in years 2006 and 2007 by the World Editors Forum (side by side with guardian.co.uk, timesonline.co.uk, globeandmail.com and elpais.com), as well as the largest Croatian classifieds platform njuskalo.hr, the best Croatian online bookstore profil.hr, news portal vecernji.hr, and the Croatia's largest photo agency pixsell.hr, which provides images for the most part of the Croatian media space.

Each of these implementations is a market leader within its own industry, and most of them handle traffic by orders of magnitude larger than that of their direct competitors.

Our technology is tested under extreme traffic. Trikoder is the only Croatian web development company that has developed more than one website positioned in the Croatian top ten, when both, the number of page views, and the total reach are considered. As a matter of fact, one of those websites is positioned in the top two according to Gemius and Google Analytics.

That effectively means that our technology can take extreme traffic loads and still work without a glitch, which is often a problem with other technologies, especially those with which most of the developers have only secondhand familiarity, i.e. when they were not the core developers of the platform themselves.

It is also important to point out that all these achievements are being accomplished without a large number of servers used. Some of the projects mentioned herein work on a single application server, and none of them works on more than three.

No web project is ever truly finished in a way that no new features will ever be needed. That is the nature of web as a rapidly changing and evergrowing medium. In these circumstances it is crucial that the technology platform is easily extensible without sacrificing its stability and robustness, and that there is nothing at all that is impossible to implement.

This is where our platform excels. Large new features are implemented and pushed out to production on the weekly basis for most of our largest projects. That allows our clients' businesses to easily outrun any competition attempts to close the technology gap, as well as the ability to set the pace of the technology race.

New media devices, like smart phones and similar, are seamlessly incorporated in all of our applications since our technology base is open-ended. It is only natural for it to grow and adapt to new media and formats. We have been developing iPhone applications that use the contents of existing web applications, without any need for further modifications, just by adding new templates to a presentation layer.

The Trikoder framework has all of the standard rapid development features like code generation, automatic administration interfaces, a highly versatile abstracted data layer, component design, templating, and so on. However, all of these features are developed with developers in mind and are designed to offer maximum rapid development potential without limiting the developers' freedom to choose the optimal system design for the task at hand.

Our technology is developed in such a way that we can use it to rapidly develop any class of applications, and to develop even more rapidly any application type that we have already developed before (portal, classifieds, webshop, etc.).

This is where we really stand out. The state-of-the-art technology itself is not sufficient, since it is not the tool that does the work, but rather the hand that wields that tool. We possess the expertise in a variety of web application classes, which is very rare in the web industry, especially when talking about areas so drastically different as portals and classifieds systems, while featuring web applications that are the market leaders in their respective fields.

We have developed a large variety of web applications and never encountered anything that could not be done one way or another. When we say that it can be done, you can be sure that we have already done most of it before at the highest level, and that we are well aware of all the pitfalls that others, though technically competent, usually are not.

While we have the capacity to perform any technical task required, it is you who have the vision of what you want to achieve. This is crucial and without it no great project can be accomplished. However, it is more common among web development companies that a client has a vision, but the technology used forces it to fit the mould suitable for that particular technology and not the vision itself. We do not do that and we are quite proud to have such an approach.

Our service is to create whatever you have envisioned without ever limiting you with the technology. Basically, if we need to invent or bend something because you need a certain feature, we will do that. We feel that this is one of our strongest points and certainly one worth stating.

Available technologies

We have been developing some of the biggest Croatian portals and we are currently the only Croatian web development company that has developed more than two portals which were at one point ranked among the top ten websites according to Gemius and Google Analytics. Besides that, two of our best known sites are radically different at the same time.

Vecernji.hr is a "classic" portal and by "classic" we mean not "old fashioned", but rather "not radical". It has all the features of the world's best news portals and it has a highly flexible and modular frontend allowing editors to change the look and feel of their homepages radically and quickly when the need arises (breaking news, a developing story, an important announcement, etc.). Multimedia in every form (images, videos, Google Maps, etc.) are native to this platform and there are no restrictions as to where any of them can or cannot appear. The same platform was used to develop vijesti.me, the leading news portal in Montenegro which doubled its traffic within three months of relaunch using Trikoder technology.

The same technology platform was also used to develop the original scroll-less version of 24sata.hr which was ranked as one of the top five news portals in years 2006 and 2007 by the World Editors Forum. That portal was surely the most distinctive looking news web portal in Croatia and we dare say it is one of the most distinctive in the world, because of its scroll-less feature where everything is in a single page and resizable to fit your browser. The article contents are rendered in columns, which is something that is rarely ever seen in other sites.

Also, the cooking portal platform with distributed content sharing and centralized content translation system was developed using the same basic platform. Its first implementation is jazkuham.si – one of the leading Slovenian cooking portals.

Last but not the least is bika.net, an employment website and business network portal. Its highly developed social networking features and selection processes automation makes it unique in Croatian web space. It goes without mention that the same basic technology was used as in previous examples.

These are some completely distinct results of using our unique technology. We feel that these examples clearly show the flexibility of our technology and the depth of our experience in news portal development.

We have developed njuskalo.hr, the leading Croatian classifieds portal, leading not only in overall classifieds business, but also in specialized sections for cars and real estate. It is also ranked among the top six Croatian websites with respect to the reach, and among the top four with respect to the pageviews count. Its first competitor has the monthly traffic lower by an order of magnitude. It features all the "classic" classifieds features, like hierarchical browsing, specialized ad classes, each of which has its own specialized set of data, its own specialized filters and search features and, of course, its own specialized display, where one ad class can be completely different from another. It can include completely new features (for example, Google Maps or 3d panorama views for flats or houses, and so on) and any kind of multimedia is natively supported.

It also features a specialized end-user backend with a large number of advanced inventory keeping options, integration with SAP, integration with external services such as Eurotax, automated content exchange, the prepaid and postpaid business model support, and so on. One part that we feel important to mention is the business model itself. There is no magic "one size fits all" business model for classifieds and it is a fair bet that any other implementation of our classifieds technology would be quite different from njuskalo.hr in that aspect.

That is why we designed and developed a modular "detachable" business model logic which can be developed and suited exactly for you. We feel that it is critically important that your business does not bend and mould to suit our technology, but the other way around. Our technology should give life to your exact vision, because that vision itself is what separates your business from the multitude of others.

We have developed profil.hr, one of the leading Croatian webshops. It is primarily a bookstore, but it offers musical CDs, video DVDs and computer games. Webshops are specific beasts, meaning that you have probably seen them all, all the wish lists, shopping carts, clever "buy two for the price of one" discounts, user reviews, multimedia and so on.

We have also seen them all and have built all kinds of them using our webshop technology. Sadly however, that just guarantees that your shop will not be inferior to others and, in order to really make it stand out, some new and special ideas needs to be implemented. That is where your creativity kicks in and must not be restricted by technology limits.

Probably more than a lot of other web application types, webshops make their market edge by creating unique product packages, special offers, presenting products in a special way, and so on. The key here is creativity and we believe that predefined business models do not work very well here, therefore, we created a business model framework which allows us to implement all of your business ideas and a creative product presentation that will give you that little extra edge so needed in today's highly competitive webshop arena.

Ok, anything goes here and it might sound conceited, but we can develop just about anything. Using the same basic technology as for portals, classifieds and webshops, we have developed pixsell.hr, a leading Croatian photo agency website, as well as a website for visually impaired savez-slijepih.hr, just to name a few.

We feel the key in developing custom-made solutions is that Trikoder provides the technological expertise and ideas, while the client has a strong concept. This is where synergy should happen and where it is crucially important that we never answer any of your requests with "it cannot be done". Perhaps it cannot be done in the way you originally imagined, but we will work with you to get the original idea through in some other way.

We will not be bound by standards. We are not saying that they are not important, because they really are, but they are not magical barriers that cannot be broken if you are aware of the costs involved. Take the original scroll-less version of 24sata.hr, for example. It had limited accessibility due to its inability to enlarge fonts because there is a limited amount of space on the screen and there is no scrolling. That was a calculated decision, knowing all the things that will be lost in order to achieve the "no scroll goal". And it proved to be a great one. That version of 24sata.hr increased its reach tenfold in the span of about 18 months since its launch using Trikoder technology.

iPhones and especially iPads are pushing boundaries of portable personal content delivery. Although all of our projects are already mobile phone friendly, since presentation and logic are clearly divided, we feel that these Apple devices are in a class of their own and require both your and our special attention.

That is why Trikoder has been developing and offering a full range of native iPhone applications for our portal platform, fully utilizing its unique features that enable us to deliver the news contents in a truly new and unique way almost at the same time as these devices become available to the general public.

And finally, we are employing iPhone/iPad developers approved by Apple and therefore we can develop any industrial quality custom application meeting your exact specifications, ranging from the news reader to video games.

Selected works

pixsell.hr

custom-made technology, php, mysql, xhtml/css, design

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