Smart TV Application Development for the Hotel Chain

Working with popular, but new technology

We were getting acquainted with documentation related to Smart TV development since it drastically differs from those of standard documentation in software development. But our team quickly mastered new technologies and managed to deliver an app within one month.

Dealing with the predefined tech stack

Sombra team worked with predefined by customer tech stack. While we decided on application architecture and selected CMS solution based on what will be most convenient in terms of managing content. If necessary, our team can choose the tech stack based on the needs of the project, time and budget.

Page navigation

Scrolling implementation was challenging in this project. There were two options to navigate the page: using a magic mouse wheel or remote control buttons. The biggest problem was to get the Magic mouse wheel event to scroll the page. According to official documentation, we should either go with Enyo (for webOS v4.0 and lower) or Enact (webOS v5.0).

Since we used webOS v5.0 – Enyo wasn’t an option. But on the other hand, Enact better suits to ReactJs and we worked with VueJS. Being at a dead end, we decided, that the best option is to fit all content on the view-screen eliminating the need to scroll.

Monitoring and logging errors

Working with different TV screens often brings issues with the correct content display. Realizing such a problem will arise, we decided to capture detailed information about errors and request processing in log files, which will then be sent to the specific IP address.