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HomeGain Implements Zope Solution

About HomeGain

HomeGain connects buyers, sellers, and real estate agents who use the Company's search and listing services to locate or list properties. HomeGain offers

  • an agent evaluator, to help buyers and sellers choose an agent proper for them,
  • a home valuation tool, to calculate the valuation of a property,
  • a sale maximizer to help a seller increase the sale value of a home,
  • many calculators which assist in complex real estate financial calculations.

HomeGain partners with Yahoo! to provide Yahoo! Real Estate. HomeGain also offers cobranded services for numerous other real estate listing sites.

HomeGain Uses Zope

Zope is the engine powering HomeGain's site, connecting application services and data spread among a farm of machines. HomeGain's services are custom remote procedure calls (RPC) written in the Python language using the RPC library ``ILU,'' available as open source from Xerox PARC. Using Python and Zope Corporation's Oracle binding for Python (DCOracle), HomeGain runs RPC servers which convert tabular data in Oracle to Python objects, then accessed in Zope by ILU RPC calls. HomeGain was able to use Zope to create a new security authenticator to extend Zope's authentication mechanism via ILU to data stored in Oracle.

Every HomeGain developer runs a local copy of Zope, which allows them to test changes independently from the production system. When a change is ready to be committed to the system, it is exported from the development system to testing, quality assurance, staging, and finally production systems.

Zope Customizes New Presentation Layer and Services

Zope Corporation's engineers designed new features and services, including transforming the HomeGain site with a custom presentation layer to provide the Yahoo! Real Estate section.

They wrote new services to extend the functionality of HomeGain's site, both for external, publicly available services and for internal services to help HomeGain track its business. Zope Corporation also:

  • Performed analysis to troubleshoot problems with ILU and Oracle
  • Extended the existing HomeGain codebase
  • Reskinned HomeGain's site to provide Yahoo! Real Estate
  • Enabled Yahoo! site membership by customizing the Zope authentication service
  • Wrote new and extended existing ILU (RPC) services
  • Extended Oracle schema for new features
  • Provided Agent photo submission capability
  • Wrote custom customer relationship tracking to identify revenue opportunities

Zope Corporation identified stability problems arising from the HomeGain configuration which were difficult to diagnose at the production site because of the hosting site's data access control rules. HomeGain's architecture enables HomeGain to add additional capacity on demand.

Challenges

  • Quickly deploy technical requirements for customer's new business relationship
  • Anticipate on-going performance requirements by increasing scale and improving CORBA stability
  • Deliver new business reporting requirements

Approach

  • Rapidly assemble a team of Zope experts to work closely with HomeGain's project manager
  • Research and implement CORBA debugging code to diagnose and address problems in the external system
  • Refactor and support existing codebase while creating new services

Benefits

  • On-time delivery of customer's Yahoo!-branded service
  • Dramatic decrease in number of support requests sent to hosting provider
  • Enhanced business opportunities through improved application service and internal operations support

I have been working with Internet technology and its challenges since 1989 and our most difficult task is to quickly convert legacy applications and data into a web based application. The best example of this legacy application was the Navy's Engineering Change Proposal Application. An automated tool was supposed to streamline a very common business task. Many contractors and application developers have attempted to automate this process and have failed. We turned to the development product ZOPE and have completely rewritten the meaning of legacy conversions. The ECP application was developed under ZOPE and accepted after an extensive competitive development process.
- James Glenn, Internet Branch Head Code J561, Space and Electronic Warfare Command, System Support Center Charleston, U.S. Navy Internet Manager