Beer Hunter: Even More Fun as a Flex RIA

Company:

Andrews Distributing, the nation’s leading beverage brand builder.

Challenge:

Andrews came to Pathfinder Development to enhance their website, DestinationBeer.com, with features that would not only serve to educate their customers, retailers and employees about the beer selections that Andrews offers, but also be fun to use.

Solution:

Pathfinder’s approach is focused on user-centric design and when combined with Andrews’ requirement that it also be fun, we came up with a concept that would appeal both to the casual beer drinker and to those well-versed in beer knowledge.

The Beer Hunter is a map-based beer finder on which people can browse beers from specific regions, by styles or by specific attributes that they can set (e.g., bitterness, darkness, etc.).

Using Flex and Ruby, Pathfinder developed the Beer Hunter to hook into the body of knowledge on Andrews’ Ruby on Rails site and directly interact with the site’s database. Initial data is loaded at the world view, and pertinent details are displayed when the user clicks on a region, style or beer. In addition, the data is filtered as the user drills down into the details. For example, click on a continent, and the data is filtered to show only the styles and beers available on that continent. Click on a country, and the information is filtered again but this time to the country level.

Impact:

The combination of Ruby and Flex allowed Pathfinder to design and develop this application in a little over a month. In addition, because our development process creates extensible software, Andrews will be able to build upon this concept for future features.

Contact the team that created teh Beer Hunter.