Powering CommBank's augmented-reality Property Guide
In August 2010 the Commonwealth Bank of Australia launched the CommBank Property Guide for iPhone — one of the first major banking or property apps anywhere to use augmented reality. Point the camera at a house and the screen overlaid its sales history, current listings and estimated value, drawn live from data covering more than 95% of residential properties in Australia.
ToolTwist built the backend that made it move.
The hard part wasn't the camera
The augmented-reality overlay was the part everyone saw. The part that made it work was less visible: every figure on that screen had to arrive fast enough to feel pinned to a building the user was physically standing in front of, and it had to be stitched together from sources that were never designed to talk to each other.
Property data came from providers like RP Data (now CoreLogic) and realestate.com.au, alongside the bank's own systems. Each spoke its own dialect of legacy XML, on its own schedule, with its own quirks. A phone holding a camera up to a house can't wait on any of that.
A fast JSON API in an XML world
So we wrote an API that did two jobs at once.
It translated — pulling in the disparate legacy XML feeds from the various providers and back-end applications, reconciling their formats, and resolving a street address into a single coherent record.
And it served that record as JSON, at a time when JSON over a mobile network was still novel. Most enterprise integration in 2010 still meant SOAP and verbose XML payloads. For a latency-sensitive AR app on a 2010-era phone and mobile connection, that overhead was the difference between magic and frustration. A lean JSON response over the wire, assembled from the messy XML behind it, was what let the data feel instantaneous.
On top of that the app layered home-loan calculators, suburb demographics, median prices and auction results — all of it riding the same backend.
The result
The app reached over 117,000 downloads in its first 24 weeks, peaked as the number one lifestyle app in Australia, and won top honours at the AIMIA Awards.
Looking back, it's a reminder of a pattern that has run through ToolTwist's work for a long time: the interesting engineering is usually the unglamorous middle layer — the part that takes whatever the legacy systems actually produce and turns it into something a modern front end can consume, fast.
Coverage at launch: CBA launches property iApp — The Adviser.