Y! Intern Showcase

Arpit Jain

Yahoo! Small Business Group

Project details

Initially working on the PayPal bill me later project for first 2.5 weeks of the internship.

However, the details of the project got finalized later by Yahoo! and PayPal authorities.

Later assigned the project on implementing the floating cart interface for Apple devices and future updated versions of Android.

Business Need

Floating cart gives dynamicity to the website.

Floating cart makes the customer make multiple purchases without getting redirected to checkout page.

Increases customer retention and hence ensures MORE BUSINESS!

Problem : Floating cart does not work in Apple Devices. Also new versions of Android too won’t support it!! sReason: It makes use of 3rd party proprietary feature : Flash

Value proposition

Yahoo! Store has 33,000 merchants as its customers at present.

Considering atleast 100 customers per merchant. Total lives to be impacted: 33000*100=3.3 Million!!!!

Considering the fact that Yahoo! Store has USA as its target region, number of customers using the platform on mobile devices: 1-2 million.

Direct impace on 2Million people’s online shopping experience!!!!!

More and more $$$ for the company!!!

Challenges faced

Lots of legacy code!!!

Challenges facedExisting code made use of flash for both Connection Manager and Storage Modules(YUI2).

Dealt with fc.js file (pretty elaborate code!!,hopefully it was well documented!)

Understanding the existing XHR requests being made with cross domain calls.

Understanding YMix! And YFlow! Technology and workflow.

Some part of code involved 13year old code base(thankfully did not have to interact with it).

Solution OverviewPresented the concept using YUI3 Storage engine for retention of localstorage data. Mostly front-end work.

Presented a “Proof of concept” using a pre-prod store using an external button. The demo made use of YUI3 IO and Javascript codebase.

Dealt with fc.js file on BDT1 server(rather than on DevBox).

Cross domain calls are generally the lesser touched portion on the web.However this thing can be easily handled using native transport functionality in YUI3.

Solution OverviewAnalyzing the requests made using POST and RESPONSE parameters using firebug and chrome debugger.

Prepared the code sample to work in correspondence with jscore/fc.js file(over 7000lines of code).

Understanding the existing XHR requests being made with cross domain calls.

Got rid of connection parameters(files) such as io.swf to make cross domain calls.

Sample Screenshots

Sample Screenshots

There’s life outside project too!!Attended the Summer School at IISC, Bangalore, on Semantic Web and Information Retrieval.

Participated and successfully submitted the hack in Yahoo! Hackathon this quarter. The hack involved generating Flickr! Images corresponding to a news article. Technology used: PHP, Python, Javascript, JSON, XML.

Attended the session on Mojito held early may.

Got to know industry experience and working in a collaborative environment in a big group in an international company.

Life at Y!