Love Island
Vote for your favorite couple
Love Island: determine the participants’ destiny
Love Island is a dating show in the style of Temptation Island and Ex On The Beach. RTL has attained high ratings with this programme, which is about Dutch singles who are looking for true love. And Egeniq too is absolutely thrilled with the series. Not only because we love the excitement and drama that the show provides, but also because we created the Love Island App!
The most interactive dating programme ever
The singles of Love Island spend six weeks in a beautiful, luxurious villa at a scenic tropical location. They must win the love of a possible partner, but also the hearts of the audience. As a viewer, you can use the Love Island App to choose your most and your less favourite couple. In addition, you decide which potential participants can stay in the villa. So, with this app, the singles’ happiness in love lies in your hands!
Technology behind the app
The app that we developed for Love Island consists of four parts: the app itself, a CMS, an Api (from where the apps can retrieve their data and send the votes to) and a page on which the editing team can watch the voting results. Of course, when building the app, we were faced with several challenges, such as realising a quick loading time and providing sufficient capacity for the simultaneous usage by multiple visitors.
In order to optimise the functioning of the app, Egeniq’s team decided to divide the API into two parts. The first part contains the content, of which about 90% remains unchanged. The integration of a cache memory has enabled the app to load quickly. This means that a large number of visitors can read the content at the same time without any complications. We made this possible by means of HTTP caching via AWS CloudFront. The first part of the API is built using PHP based on the Lumen framework. It is hosted in AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).
The second part of the API consists of the vote section. Once the programme has released a voting round, multiple votes will enter the app. Because prior to building the API we were not sure how many people would respond per round, we did not know how many votes the app should be able to process. That is why we chose to build the second part separately from the first part, opting for a serverless architecture. This approach (in theory) enables the handling of an infinite number of simultaneous requests. The vote section is written in Javascript and hosted in AWS Lambda. Owing to these choices, the app is well protected from premature ‘overheating’. The app has been configured and deployed using a Serverless framework (serverless.com).