Profinit Case Study

About Profinit

Profinit provides clients with complex IT services, from consulting on systems development, modernization and process optimization, business and IT architecture, through to the final supply of the solution and service. Established in 1998 and headquartered in Prague, with technical facilities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, we presently provide services to over 50 customers across Central Europe and the US.

In 2015 IDC Research placed us as second biggest Czech provider of custom application development. We achieve success by using leading products and technologies, best of breed methodologies, in-house innovations and by employing the best people.

Bitcoin exchange – coinmate.io

We have developed Bitcoin exchange coinmate.io for our customer Confirmo Ltd. The exchange allows users to buy and sell Bitcoin with the real exchange rate. Zkoss Framework is used for implementation of both public portal, where users can register and trade, and back-office application.

The project started at the beginning of 2014, we implemented the application in 6 month with a team of 4-6 people. The first version was released in 10/2014. Since then, we have worked in a smaller team to integrate other payment methods, create live trading page and implement a new visual style. Our success comes from using leading products and technologies, best of breed methodologies, in-house innovations and by employing the best people.

Why ZK

Our team had experiences with JSF, Vaadin, Tapestry and Struts. For this project we created a proof of concept in three Java Frameworks – JSF, Vaadin and Zkoss. We compared these frameworks using ten criteria such as security, integration with Spring, support for Bootstrap and Server Push. Zkoss seemed to be the best fit for our requirements.

After we started to implement our application, Zkoss worked fine with live validations and evaluations or Load on demand. However, we found out that using Bootstrap is not as easy as was presented in the demo.

Best of ZK

Zkoss is great for back-office applications that do not require custom graphic design and that has limited amount of users. We like that Zkoss allows to simply access Spring beans in ViewModels, Controllers and Views and that pages can be created with MVVM pattern quite fast.

We especially like the native and XHTML components, which allow us to keep control over the final HTML output. This is complicated in some other component-based Java frameworks for GUI. This helped us to create pages with graphical styles that were designed as HTML and CSS by external company.

We also like MVVM pattern that allowed us to create back-office application with less effort.

The Result

Zkoss helps us to make fast changes in backoffice application. We have been using the application for 2.5 years so far and we plan to continue use ZK and improve the usability of back-office application.