Introducing the Activity Open Platform: Architecture, Features, and Deployment

Last year, on May 15, 2020, we published the article "Wanxiang: Activity Self‑Service Platform" which introduced the platform’s origin, pain points, and features, and outlined a long‑term plan to evolve it into an Activity Open Platform; after more than a year of effort, that goal has now been realized.

What is the Activity Open Platform? It is a company‑wide platform aimed at maximizing activity asset reuse by enabling all employees to co‑create and share activity components, allowing anyone to develop components freely and use those contributed by others.

Why build the Activity Open Platform? Four perspectives drive the upgrade: (1) the existing self‑service platform relies on a single team, limiting productivity; (2) repetitive activity development consumes effort and stifles innovation; (3) other teams cannot directly reuse suitable activities, leading to duplicated work; (4) human resources are siloed across departments, and a shared mechanism is needed to unlock their value.

Approach and key solutions

Standardized development process – provide a component scaffolding tool for creation, development, and publishing; a bridge service integrating multi‑platform functions and common utilities; a shared UI library for UI plugins; a comprehensive instrumentation and analytics system with reporting; and a unified third‑party library management and referencing mechanism.

Cross‑team collaborative development – a platform‑level management mechanism that allows external teams to develop independently; componentized, single‑responsibility design that supports multi‑department collaboration.

High scalability – support online script editing to quickly extend component capabilities; online style editing; free composition of multiple components into new ones; and customizable advanced configuration entry points for components.

These solutions are integrated into a new architecture that equips the Activity Open Platform with comprehensive product service capabilities.

Implementation progress – the platform required a large‑scale system redesign and was divided into multiple phases; phase four is complete, and the platform is now fully available for external use.

Application scenarios – the platform offers three capabilities: Pro‑code, Low‑code, and No‑code. No‑code provides visual activity configuration for product operations, while Pro‑code and Low‑code enable developers to build highly extensible components. Development modes include independent project development, inter‑department collaborative development (splitting activity pages into modules handled by different teams), and clear front‑end/back‑end division.

Promotion results – the platform is currently used by six departments, has generated 70 new components, launched 382 new activities, with each component reused on average 17 times, and has improved activity development efficiency by roughly 40%.

Looking ahead, the platform will continue to iterate, expanding upstream and downstream activity chains to address efficiency gaps and exploring a SaaS direction to support the company’s industry chain and external commercialization opportunities.

In summary, the transition from the Wanxiang Activity Self‑Service Platform to the Activity Open Platform has enabled the creation of 4,450 activities to date, thanks to the active feedback and collaboration of business partners and the dedicated efforts of the development team.

Authors: Senior Engineer Ni Chang‑en, Senior Engineer Wang Weizhen, Product Manager Tang Yanchao, and the Market Center team.