The Challenge: Migrate to a New Technology Platform

"The Reader's Digest Association, Inc. is a global leader in publishing and direct marketing, creating and delivering products that inform, enrich, entertain and inspire people of all ages and cultures. The Company's flagship magazine, Reader's Digest, is published in 48 editions and 19 languages and is sold in more than 60 countries."

As part of a shift in technology, Reader's Digest moved from a Microsoft-based ecommerce platform to one based on Java and JSP. New initiatives were being designed with this technology while the existing web site needed to be converted.

The Solution: Seamless Conversion

The TwinLabs mini-site is an example of a partnerships that Reader's Digest tries to forge with other companies. The primary purpose of such partnerships is to expand their user base without having to invest heavily in niche markets that others can serve more effectively. In this case, a survey and order page is hosted by Reader's Digest. The orders gathered from these pages are forwarded (in a special file format) to TwinLabs for fulfillment. This set of pages were originally written using Active Server Pages (ASP) and were migrated to Java Server Pages (JSP) along with over a hundred other pages as part of Reader's Digest's move from a Microsoft-based environment to a Sun Solaris, Unix-based environment.

The poster order form (below, left) is an example of a typical order page for a Reader's Digest product. This, and most other order pages, accepts payment by credit card and so must interact, in real-time, with Verisign. Many of the order pages are tied to sweepstakes and as a result attract tens of thousands of visitors. As such the design of the order pages and related databases must be capable of handling many simultaneous visitors. I created this page using the same architecture I developed during my ASP to JSP migration efforts mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Running alongside this order form is a report (proprietary information has been zeroed). This report (below, right) is typical of the various reports used to track sales, profitability, and site traffic. These reports retrieve data from production servers in real-time and so their impact on the servers must be kept to a minimum. The impact is minimized by keeping the front-end simple; ensuring that the source database tables were properly indexed; and writing efficient SQL queries.