Leapfrog
LeapFrog Enterprises Inc NYSE: LF is an educational toy company based in Emeryville, California. LeapFrog designs, develops and markets technology-based learning products and related content for the education of infant through grade school children at home and in schools internationally.
Business Situation
Leapfrog has been developing learning tools and toys for children for over 15 years. And with the onset of the internet, they saw an opportunity to develop and store data from each child that was gathered on the handhelds educational toys and learning devices. This would allow them to provide feedback to parents on the progress of their child and give awards to the children for completing tasks. This would also make the toys more marketable and allow flexibility with upgrades and downloadable updates.
Technical Situation
Leapfrog needed to provide a complete services layer and enterprise service bus that allowed users to create accounts, login, connect and register devices, and monitor child progress. The initial roll out provided the basics, but was not nearly ready for the holiday season and the expectation of 1.5 million new accounts on Christmas Day. With the current services layer in place, account creation was taking approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds to complete. Each account creation required 2 round trips to an outside vender.
Solution
An open source services solution was put in place providing CXF endpoints for integration with the customer facing UI components. These endpoints were used by several front-end technologies to simplify the development and integration of all Leapfrog’s UI’s. The account creation implementation was reworked to change the source of accounts to be controlled by Leapfrog and allowing the services to asynchronously manage messaging from the front-end. This took the account creation time from one and half minutes to less then 1 second. Enterprise service bus was used to transform information asynchronously to make efficient use of CPU and server utilization. IO was analyzed to provide for aggregation to minimize the number of round trips from the web application to the backend systems and third party vendors. Effective use of Enterprise Integration Patterns provided best practice use of backend processes, leveraging additional efficient use of CPU and server resources.
Benenfits
With the new services layer in place, Leapfrog was able to handle the load of new customers on Christmas Day. The services layer was able to handle the largest load Leapfrog has ever experienced.
