The client

A leading NGO that serves as a donation platform and allows you to support a cause of your choice from about 100 NGOs that have been scrutinized for transparency and credibility.

The business need

The NGO had developed a comprehensive website application that took care of their complete online activities. It was a transactional website with multiple payment modes available for donations. The stability of the site was a major concern. The server needed to be rebooted 2-3 times a day. And website was not secure enough to prevent hacking.

They approached Arion with the following priorities

• Stabilize the website
• Implement the security features
• Manage and enhance the website

Arion’s solution

Arion used Open Source technologies to make the website stable and secure. It helped the NGO maximize it’s returns from its decision to go with Open source by implementing patches, fine-tuning and upgrading the existing infrastructure.

The NGO’s website now runs on the following infrastructure

Fedora Core 3

The latest open-source OS readily available at the time of installation. It has a lot of components bundled with it that are used by the web site. It also supports the latest security enhancing technology called SELinux from NSA (National Security Agency, USA).

Apache HTTPD

The default web-server. This is one of the most commonly used web-servers. Despite being open-source, it is the most popular web-server in use. It offers excellent performance and a wide support for connecting with a large number of Java Application servers.

PostgreSQL

This is a full featured open-source RDBMS with ACID transactions and compatible with ANSI SQL 92

Jakarta Tomcat

Tomcat is the reference implementation for JSP/Servlets. The use of Tomcat ensures that the application will remain compatible with most J2EE compliant application servers in the market today.

Jakarta Struts

This framework is the de-facto standard for MVC architecture in J2EE environments. This helps keep business logic separate from the database model and the JSP presentation, allowing relative ease in modification of user interfaces without needing to modify core business logic.

Java Open Transaction Manager

This is the core transaction engine being used. Transaction management is important since the application deals in online transaction.

Results

1. There is no downtime of the site due to infrastructural reasons
2. The number of users have increased, resulting in more donations, due to the improved stability