Custom-built holidays booking engine to meet Broadways unique requirements for flexibility of integration and functionality. It combines powerful features such as dynamic packaging; mixing different operations in one call; data hand off to back-end systems, etc. It provides a unified interface and XML schema to different service and data providers.
PHP provides all we need to handle HTTP requests and responses, as well as XML data processing. The combination of PHP-FPM, Nginx and PhalconPHP happened to be the right choice for high availability and scalability. Running parallel tasks in PHP is not something standard, but thanks to Gearman, we are able to do it in cost-effective and efficient way.
PhalconPHP comes packed with a Micro framework as well, which is primarily designed with RESTful web services in mind. It gave us the opportunity to build the booking engine eco-system around the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern. In other words, instead of build a monster-like piece of software, we've decided to go with smaller, as independant as possible, web services and to avoid the Single Point of failure.
Broadway Travel is one of the leading OTA (Online Travel Agent) in the UK, since 1948. Running their own network of websites, Broadway offers the full stack of holiday-related services and products.
