We believe food is meant to be ordered online at OrderUp. By bringing the internet to takeout and delivery via an online franchise model, we give our users the power to discover local restaurants and the convenience of a seamless ordering experience. Part of how we’re able to do this is by relying on the abundance of robust services on the web today. For any hard problem that is secondary to our core business, there is likely already a third-party solution. Our goal is to design a product that takes advantage of this by choosing the best services and integrating them intelligently with the OrderUp online franchise platform.
A Few Services We Use
OrderUp’s vision depends on the existence of a rich foundation of web services. Our customer facing application, for instance, makes tens of thousands of requests every day to multiple services:
Service
Yelp Businesses
Why We Use It
Makes millions of business ratings available to customers during the restaurant discovery process.
Service
Google Geocoding
Why We Use It
Converts between addresses and geographic coordinates to find restaurants that will deliver to you. Also allows restaurant owners to administer precise zones that they will deliver to.
Service
Authorize.net
Why We Use It
Secures payment gateway for managing credit cards and processing transactions.
How We Integrate Intelligently
In order to successfully build an application above foundational web services like these, it’s important to follow a principle of software design that applies to working with software written by other people. The basic idea is to write a layer of code between the application and the third-party code which translates between the “language” the application speaks and the “language” that their code speaks. This pattern is commonly referred to as the facade pattern.
Why We Use the Facade Pattern
This strategy for working with third-party software has crucial benefits:
- It translates third-party code to the application‘s vocabulary and, in addition, reduces its functionality to the much smaller subset needed by the application. This makes it easier for programmers to understand and work with in the context of their application.
- By insulating the third-party code from the application with an intermediary facade layer, the application doesn’t depend on any one provider of a service. If a much better service comes along, it should be trivial to remove the old one and hook in the new one to the already existing facade. The application’s relationship to the facade need not change.
By applying principles of good software design like the facade pattern, the OrderUp platform evolves alongside the accelerating foundational service layer of today’s web. This means that OrderUp is always using the best of the web to power our online franchise system. And our users, in turn, can expect the best experience ordering food online.
We believe food is meant to be ordered online at OrderUp. By bringing the internet to takeout and delivery via an online franchise model, we give our users the power to discover local restaurants and the convenience of a seamless ordering experience. Part of how we’re able to do this is by relying on the abundance of robust services on the web today. For any hard problem that is secondary to our core business, there is likely already a third-party solution. Our goal is to design a product that takes advantage of this by choosing the best services and integrating them intelligently with the OrderUp online franchise platform.
OrderUp’s vision depends on the existence of a rich foundation of web services. Our customer facing application, for instance, makes tens of thousands of requests every day to multiple services:
Service
Yelp Businesses
Why We Use It
Makes millions of business ratings available to customers during the restaurant discovery process.
Service
Google Geocoding
Why We Use It
Converts between addresses and geographic coordinates to find restaurants that will deliver to you. Also allows restaurant owners to administer precise zones that they will deliver to.
Service
Authorize.net
Why We Use It
Secures payment gateway for managing credit cards and processing transactions.
How We Integrate Intelligently
In order to successfully build an application above foundational web services like these, it’s important to follow a principle of software design that applies to working with software written by other people. The basic idea is to write a layer of code between the application and the third-party code which translates between the “language” the application speaks and the “language” that their code speaks. This pattern is commonly referred to as the facade pattern.
This strategy for working with third-party software has crucial benefits:
- It translates third-party code to the application‘s vocabulary and, in addition, reduces its functionality to the much smaller subset needed by the application. This makes it easier for programmers to understand and work with in the context of their application.
- By insulating the third-party code from the application with an intermediary facade layer, the application doesn’t depend on any one provider of a service. If a much better service comes along, it should be trivial to remove the old one and hook in the new one to the already existing facade. The application’s relationship to the facade need not change.
By applying principles of good software design like the facade pattern, the OrderUp platform evolves alongside the accelerating foundational service layer of today’s web. This means that OrderUp is always using the best of the web to power our online franchise system. And our users, in turn, can expect the best experience ordering food online.
