Technology

At STATE OF TOMORROW, we believe that in an environment where you have millions of customers shopping around the clock and around the globe, the way you handle your business online defines your capacity for success.

STATE OF TOMORROW has created a revolutionary Content Managment System that understands the specific needs of the fashion industry, and focuses on ease-of-use and the customer experience.

CMS

Overview

The nature of the web and the way consumers interact with the online environment is constantly changing, so not being able to maneuver quickly means not being able to survive. You don't need to be a technology expert to run a successful e-commerce business - we make it easy and back it up with solid retail strategy.

We believe in constantly evolving, and our CMS provides the ability to manage, change, and re-imagine the content on your site whenever you choose.
Drag & drop uploads
Our CMS makes content uploading a breeze.

We offer drag n drop uploading to make merchandising your site simple & easy to understand.
Click & Merchandising
A key feature of the SOT-CMS is the ability to merchandise any product page easily. Products (or looks) are remerchandised via drag n drop functionality in seconds. We know that strategic merchandising means solid and consistent sales.

Just like a retail store, e-commerce business depends on being able to react to trends, new product, customer segmentation and changes in the market. To us, ease and flexibility are necessary tools we provide to every customer.
Reuseable content
Our CMS offers an intelligent reusable content feature.

If you wish to reuse content elsewhere on the site, you simply drag the content to the new desired area meaning you don't need to worry about re-uploading the same file twice.
FEATURES:
Fashion-specific content
managment system (CMS) 		Enterprise class
e-commerce platform 		Inventory & warehouse
integration
Drag n drop uploads
& merchandising 		Automatic thumbnail
generation 		WHAT-YOU-SEE-IS-
WHAT-YOU-GET Design

CMS

Technical

THE ARCHITECTURE:

The STATE OF TOMORROW CMS is more than just a website or content management system. Underneath the hood is a set of application frameworks built on a series of design patterns and best practices. These frameworks facilitate rapid application development and allows us to build modular, plug and play components that can be easily modified to meet complex business needs. When we sat down to design the underlying application architecture for the STATE OF TOMORROW CMS, we had three key goals in mind: Performance, scalability, and security.
Performance
How a consumer perceives the speed of your site is a product of many things, which is why when we talk about performance, we don’t just talk about the code running on the server or the speed of the servers themselves.

We talk about reducing redundant HTTP requests, utilizing client side browser storage whenever possible, and reducing application spin-up time by treating the entire web site as an application instead of a series of web pages.

We talk about using cookie-less domains to serve visual assets, responsive interfaces, and asynchronous background loading of files and data.

We talk about reducing DNS lookup time, mobile optimization, and accelerating delivery of static content through global load balancing and caching.

And of course, we also talk about the server side. Utilizing event loops instead of threaded processes to increase concurrency, reducing database lookup time through intelligent schema design, and caching the results of complicated queries or processing for later use.

The net result of all this talking? A better user experience, more sales, and lower costs.
Scalability
Web sites with hundreds of users and web sites with hundreds of thousands of users have very different needs, and as the user base grows so does the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, we turned to Amazon Web Services. AWS provides reliable, flexible, and easy to use tools that allow us to monitor the resources being used by a client's web site, and to automatically add more instances when spikes in traffic are detected.
Security
When building an e-commerce system, security is paramount. A data breach can cost companies hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.

The STATE OF TOMORROW CMS is a PCI Compliant application that runs in a PCI-DSS Level 1 environment. To provide additional peace of mind, the system does not store any sensitive consumer payment information -- actual credit card numbers are stored with the payment gateway itself.

Additionally, the application takes many steps to ensure that unauthorized users are not able to gain access to information or systems.
UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGIES:
Core
Core is the JavaScript based application framework that powers all of our sites. Built entirely in house, Core provides our developers a standard interface for working with and developing loosely coupled, module-based asynchronous systems.
Ambrosia
Ambrosia is the actual application that runs on top of Core. It handles the details of running a web site as an application - loading required resources and their dependencies, page loading and unloading, and error handling.
Mongo DB
MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance, open-source, document-oriented database.
Node.js
Node.js is an event-driven server-side JavaScript environment running on top of the V8 JavaScript engine (the same engine utilized by the Google Chrome web browser).
AWS
Since early 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has provided companies of all sizes with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud.
THE FUTURE:

We're never done improving what we've built. Here's a look at what we are thinking about and working on for future versions of the STATE OF TOMORROW application framework.
Semantic Data Models
Semantic data is a conceptual data model that will enable us to embed information into data structures that allows the system to more accurately interpret meaning from the data. This would allow us to build more meaningful relationships between data without the need for manual input. In other words, we could tell customers that this shirt goes with those jeans without someone at the corporate office having to spend time manually making hundreds of associations.
Local Data Mirroring
Local Data Mirroring provides a stored copy of all the information required to run the application on the local machine, which means less network communication is required for any task. This is accomplished by only sending changed information to the server, and receiving small updates while the application is running, while consuming a reduced amount of active memory while the application is in use.

If the connection is lost or slow, the application is able to continue working uninterrupted and will sync any necessary updates with the server when a connection becomes available.