Hotelprofessionals - Let's talk technical

Hotelprofessionals.nl is a platform for everyone looking for work within the hotel branche. You can read more about that on the about us page. But how does it work?

The frontend

The part of the website most people will be looking at: the frontend. The frontend exists of everything that the user can see. A custom design made in Bootstrap and jQuery caters to the needs of creating a responsive website that looks great on all screensizes. Extra JavaScript is utilized to provide extra functionality.

Media

All media present on the website is stored on S3. This is because S3 is fast, reliable and much cheaper compared to storing such data locally, because it requires lots of disk space that needs to be fast as well! All imagery displayed is converted to the .webp format automatically for increased website loading times.

The backend

The part of the website most people don't worry about: the backend. The backend processes everything you can't see. It is split into 2 parts: the backend code and the server itself.

Backend code

The backend code ensures everything behind the scenes actually works. If you visit a URL, the backend code transforms that request into a response that is sent to your browser. But the backend does a lot more. It processes and stores applications, sends mails and saves data to cache (this is a technique to save the result of repeating tasks to be able to serve it much faster). Some of these actions are processed in the background on a so called queue, to ensure you don't have to wait too long! The backend also connects to the database. Did you know that 90% of the content on your screen is from the database? Without the backend there wouldn't be much left! The backend code is written in PHP and uses the Laravel Framework. It also utilizes other libraries such as Livewire, ElasticSearch and Laravel Localization, which provide core functionality.

The server

The server is also very important. You can write all the code you want, but without a server to host it, you have no way to connect to it. The server runs on Nginx and uses zero downtime deployment via Envoyer. This is a technique that allows the code to be updated without the server having to be offline, which is great for the user experience. The server is split in 4 parts:

Two* webservers: this hosts the website and processes all the internet traffic.
A database server: this holds the database.
A worker server: this server processes all the queue jobs.
A cache server: this server processes the cache storage and runs on Redis.

The advantage of the mentioned setup means we can easily upscale if there's too much traffic for one server. This has already been applied for the webserver: we're using a *Load Balancer for this. This is a technique to evenly distribute incoming requests between all available servers, to ensure every request is processed as fast as possible. If there's too little capacity available, this can for example be noticeable when a page takes much longer to load than normal. You're literally waiting in a virtual queue until your request can be processed.

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