Case Study: Creative Workspaces

Creative Workspaces was a monumental endeavor in data integrity and structured permissions handling. This system on the front end is a project management platform for creative professionals looking to start companies and form teams for collaborative projects. The backend requirements however were vast, and required a powerful database platform and very carefully written application code to handle all of the data and security information involved in keeping members’ projects and company secrets safe.

Creative Workspaces was designed from the ground up as a secure, scalable, project management system that can handle a lot of load despite a relatively low hardware cost. An additional challenge in this project was ensuring that the object associations and permissions dictating the user access throughout the system were dynamic and flexible enough to handle the types of scenarios that project leaders and system users might want to create for themselves throughout the system. Using an innovative polymorphic object association model, we created a backend management framework loosely based on UNIX permissions and parent-child relationships to handle the access controls. This system has been working beautifully all throughout beta and we are pleased to say it is quite a step forward in permissions structuring for a web application in a granular but intuitive manner. Lastly, one of the most interesting technical functions was the implementation of object versioning across site wide elements such as messages, tasks, and images and so on.

Popular version control systems such as GiT and SVN handle version control for distributed coding projects, but not for much else in terms of practical implementations. For Creative Workspaces however, we decided to add in the ability for the system to essentially act as a content tracker for each object in the system and allow users to cycle forwards and backwards in the history of any object that had been edited throughout its lifetime. This feature has already been a huge hit with our beta testers and we expect to it gain more attention as this project moves into the launch phase. Overall, this project was a welcomed challenge on many different technical levels and Weels Corporation enjoyed putting its collective innovation together to see the system come to life.