“BoothTong” Exhibition Service Platform

BoothTong is a one-stop exhibition booking platform developed by Shenzhen Xiaozhushou Technology for Xiaocao Faya Exhibition Technology (Shenzhen). It comprises a website portal, a WeChat mini program client, a platform back office and an exhibitor-agent back office, and provides online booth booking for organisers and exhibitors.

Project typeIndustry platform (website + mini program + two back offices)

ScenarioOne-stop booth booking for organisers and exhibitors

Project background

As the internet reaches deeper into every industry, exhibition services are moving toward platform economics: online booth booking gives exhibitors another option, and changes the old model in which a physical agent had to help buy a booth.

Such a platform has to serve three roles at once — organiser, exhibitor and agent — and absorb the traffic peaks that come with the exhibition cycle.

System components

The platform consists of four subsystems: the BoothTong website portal, the BoothTong WeChat mini program, the platform back office and the exhibitor-agent back office. The website is https://www.boothtong.com/ and the mini program is found by searching “BoothTong” in WeChat; booths and related exhibition services can be ordered online.

Technical architecture

The back office and interfaces are built on the J2EE architecture with the open-source Spring Boot framework, with front and back ends separated and the front end developed on Vue 3.0. The database is open-source MySQL, which keeps operating cost down; data read at high frequency — recent exhibition information, exhibition service information, and banners on the website and mini program — is held in Redis.

Room to scale is designed in: as business and user numbers grow, MySQL can be clustered to improve IO and read-write performance, and Nginx reverse proxying in front of the website and mini program makes it quick to build a server cluster and add capacity as needed.

Figure 1　Overall architecture: service interface, service implementation, data access and data storage layers separated, with MyBatis as the ORM and MySQL 5.7 for storage

Pages and functions

Figure 2　BoothTong home page: domestic, international and service categories, searchable by country, city, industry and exhibition name

Figure 3　Exhibition services: flights, visas, hotels, logistics and business visits by category, bookable directly

Outcome

Organisers, exhibitors and agents each have their own entrance and back office, and booking moved from offline to online.
Search and ordering are available in both the mini program and the website, so an exhibitor no longer depends on an agent for a quote.
Clustering and caching are designed into the architecture, so read pressure at exhibition peaks has an answer.

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