TruePal

TruePal is network of friends where friends can Buy/Sell or Ask questions. Join TruePal. TruePal brings you all friends together so you are always there when your friend needs you most.

Client Profile

Client is based in California, USA and has made couple of successful startups. He was looking for social networking application which help user to buy, sell items as well as question and Answer from their own network.

Business Need

One of our eminent client from USA wanted to develop kind of networking where anyone can sell or buy items for they can ask question in his own friend’s network or in friend’s friends network or so own. In Application it should show level of friend in listing like what LinkdIn does. So, they can make trust and would be more chances for make the deal.

suppose there are 3 person A, B, C such that A has B's contact and B has Both A and C 's contact and C has B's contact

So when they register A will be B's friend (direct friend (level 1)) and B will be A and C's (direct friend (level 1)) and A will be C's friend (through B So level 2).

As this is social networking application, there would be millions of the users the systems should be robust and scalable and should handle more traffic.
Also, these users can chat with each other.

Solution

As the complexity of showing level and maintaining the level for friend’s network up to 5 levels. It was nearly impossible to maintain this in traditional MySQL or MsSQL database. So, we have used Neo4J graph database to store friends relationship.

We considered all the users as the nodes of the tree and we created a relationship "FRIENDS" between them if they are a direct friend of each other. In tree, we can traverse to any depth and hence can find how we are linked to a person and at what level.

All the contacts we stored using cryptographic hash function algorithm.
We implemented openfire for the chat.
For load balancing, robust and reliable solution, we used amazon EC2 cloud solution.