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Case Study
FourSquare and Facebook Graph Integrated
Mobile Application

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Client Requirement
The client demanded a search application which totally integrates with Facebook. The application
is database-centric. When the user logs in to the system through Facebook it extracts user data
(excluding the private data) and stores it into its own database. The user profile is then
automatically created through this information.
The application is highly robust and capable of storing the user’s likes, interests, friends and
other activities. It also enables the user to search information in the database. The application is
a middleware and includes the following sections:
Log In: The user can log-in to the application only through their Facebook accounts.
My Account: The user can manage and edit their account or profile from this section. They can
also apply access specifiers to each part of the information. There are three modes of access i.e
Private, Public and Broadcast.
The information which is “Private” will not be visible in the user search whereas “Public” part of
the information will be easily available to everyone accessing the application. The information
specified under the “Broadcast” category will be visible to only those users who share similar
interests or have shared the same information under the “Broadcast” category. Therefore,
Broadcast can be called as a semi-public access specifier.
Filter User: This section allow user to apply filters in order to search other users and based on
the filter the search results will be displayed according to the relationship status, age range,
gender, near me and nearby places.
Message: Once the users are selected they can message each other and maintain a messaging
thread.
The application provides Foursquare location service integration. The users can check in to their
favorite locations, write reviews and recommendations and avail discounts too.
Project Challenges
Team faced the following challenges:
 Creating an entire architecture of the system including the UI, visualization and flow
of the application.
 Maintaining the Foursquare check-in location for each logged-in user and having a
cron job run at the server end to update the checked-in location every hour.
 Comparing the user profiles at the database-end to maintain the profile ranking for
the user keyword search.

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Technologies Used
Manpower
Planning
Keeping in mind the enormous communication with the social networking platform, SDKs like
Facebook and Foursquare were used. The challenges involved a MVC (Model View Controller)
development approach that consisted of a design pattern in which the model, the view and the
controller are separated in such a manner that modifying either the view or model component of
the program has no effect on one another.
Development Highlights
This application for iPhone was built around Objective C and almost all the other modules were
developed using foundation, core graphics and UIKIT frameworks. All the user interface
components were placed in view controllers using interface builder. The view controllers were
linked with the controller files project along with the outlets and actions of the UI element. To
import the user liked pages, interests, activities and profile information we make use of the
Facebook Graph API. To maintain the details of the user last checked-in location and to show the
user nearby location as per the current location, we used Foursquare API.
Operating System &
Server Management
iOS, Multi-Server Architecture with Staging & Production
Environment through Version Controlling releases, Server
Optimization, Security & SSL Implementation, Scheduler for Back-ups,
Alert Monitoring System Integration, Server Performance Tuning at
regular intervals, Software Firewall Configuration & Maintenance
Development Tools &
Environments
Xcode 4.2.1, Facebook Graph API, iOS SDK, Foursquare API, Objective
C, Core Data Framework etc.
Database SQLite Database Server, DB Clustering, DB Optimization, Master
Slave Replication, Query Optimization, Scheduler for Backups
Project Leader 1
Developers 2
Quality Assurance Testers 1