Re-engineering of the Abahana Villas digital platform

Project Description

For years, Abahana Villas has been a true benchmark for luxury holiday rentals on the Costa Blanca: a brand renowned for the exquisiteness of its villas, for its close and exclusive relationship with its owners, and for a commitment to quality that shows in every detail. In fact, several of its villas have served as filming locations for a number of today’s hit television series, a true testament to their prestige and exclusivity. With that same drive for excellence, and coinciding with the celebration of its 25th anniversary, Abahana took a giant leap forward and trusted JULDITEC to carry out, over the past few months, a complete re-engineering of its digital platform. The result is one of the most technically solid, secure and modern tourism platforms we have ever had the privilege of building. And it is worth underlining the scale of the challenge, because the Abahana Villas platform is no ordinary portal. It runs entirely in four languages and supports an entire business group: Abahana is far more than holiday rentals, and under its umbrella sit several lines of business, from villa sales and owner services to the rental of textiles for the villas themselves. Orchestrating that whole ecosystem within a single coherent, multilingual, high-performance platform demands a level of technical mastery and integration capability that very few teams can offer, and that is precisely where JULDITEC makes the difference. At the heart of the project was a full generational leap: we upgraded the portal from Liferay 7.4 GA120 to the latest available release, Liferay DXP 2026.Q2.1, while modernising the entire technology base to Jakarta EE 10. This was far more than a version bump; it places Abahana Villas at the absolute forefront of the platform, ready to take advantage of the newest features and the best performance Liferay offers today. We took the migration as an opportunity to rewrite the architecture following Liferay's recommended model: we left the old WAR deployments behind and migrated the entire presentation layer to Client Extensions built with React 18. The user experience now runs on a library of more than 200 custom components documented in Storybook, with custom elements for villa cards, favourites, ratings, chat and listings. Because they are catalogued in Storybook, these components are fully reusable across the rest of the Abahana group’s web platforms, speeding up new developments and ensuring a consistent look and experience throughout. The result is a faster, decoupled site that is far easier to evolve without touching the portal core. In parallel, we modernised the data model by replacing the classic Service Builder with Liferay Objects, the platform's native system. The key business entities (the villas, their ratings and the users' favourites) are now managed as Liferay objects orchestrated with Object Actions. This let us remove hard-to-maintain generated code while gaining flexibility, deeper integration with the rest of the Liferay ecosystem and faster delivery of new features. One of the improvements most appreciated by end customers was the integration of the Redsys inSite payment gateway, which lets users complete their booking and payment without ever leaving the Abahana site, in a smooth and fully trustworthy experience. We implemented it with a strong focus on security: strict ownership verification for every operation, anti-replay protection on payment confirmation, sanitisation of responses and origin validation in the communication, so that every transaction is protected from end to end. To make sure every new feature reaches production with total confidence, we also transformed the way the project is managed. We rolled out a professional GitLab-based workflow in which every development branch automatically spins up its own preview environment on a dedicated URL. Each ticket can therefore be validated in isolation (with its own database and its own search indexes) before being merged, and the environments are created and torn down automatically throughout the life cycle of each change. This has significantly raised delivery quality and given Abahana full visibility over every evolution of its platform. What is more, deployments to production run automatically every day, backed by a test suite that verifies each release before it goes live; and should anything not go as expected, an automatic rollback system instantly restores the previous version of the portal’s Docker image, so the service is never compromised. Security has been an absolute priority. We protected the portal with a ModSecurity web application firewall (WAF) governed by the OWASP Core Rule Set, deployed a Content-Security-Policy with incident monitoring, hardened TLS 1.2/1.3 with HSTS and applied anonymisation of personal data in the logs for strict GDPR compliance. On top of that, we continuously subject the code to security and quality audits with SonarQube, systematically resolving any vulnerability or defect detected. We fully modernised the infrastructure underpinning the platform. We upgraded the search engine to Elasticsearch 8, the database to PostgreSQL 17 and the web layer to Apache HTTP Server 2.4, reinforcing and scaling the nodes to comfortably handle peak high-season traffic. The entire architecture runs on Docker containers, managed centrally through Portainer, which simplifies the deployment, scalability and maintenance of every service. All of this is backed by server monitoring and centralised log management that lets us anticipate any incident and guarantee maximum service availability. We know that for Abahana the villa owners are an absolute priority, so we safeguarded their experience with a comprehensive test suite. The platform exceeds 80% unit-test coverage and ships with automated end-to-end tests in Playwright that validate, on every deployment, the portal's most critical features: owner login and the owners' area, villa search and booking, language and currency switching, and the payment process. On top of that, we run automated visual tests with Chromatic, which instantly catch any regression in the appearance of the Storybook components before it reaches production. We even validate the platform's transactional emails automatically with Mailpit, which captures the messages in the test environments and lets us verify their content and formatting before every release. In terms of code quality, the project maintains a flawless quality gate, with zero issues in SonarQube. And because a great experience should be for everyone, we have significantly improved the portal’s accessibility, bringing it closer to the WCAG standards so that anyone, including those who browse with assistive technologies, can enjoy the site without barriers. The outcome of these months of joint work is a platform worthy of everything Abahana Villas represents: fast, secure, maintainable and ready to keep growing for years to come. It has been a genuine pleasure to work alongside such a demanding and visionary client, and we are convinced that this new technology foundation will cement Abahana Villas as the undisputed reference for luxury holiday rentals on the Costa Blanca. More than a vendor, we are now their technology partner: the team Abahana relies on to imagine, build and sustain the digital future of its entire group.