A trade-and-lease marketplace built for Singapore's maritime industry — letting shipping companies list, search and negotiate vessels and equipment from one place, with chat baked in.
Vespac PTE Ltd is a Singapore-based maritime services provider with years of expertise in shipping, oil and gas. Codomotive had partnered with Vespac on several prior engagements providing software support across their domain.
For this project, Vespac wanted to expand into a new line of business: a dedicated marketplace built solely for the needs of the shipping and maritime community — somewhere buyers and sellers of vessels and equipment could find each other directly.
Grouped by layer, so you can see exactly what's running this product in production — useful if your team will eventually take this over.
Angular 7
TypeScript
RxJS
Spring Boot 2
Maven
Firestore DB
Swift (iOS)
Kotlin (Android)
Gradle
Crashlytics
Jasmine
Firebase AuthThe honest version — what slowed us down, and how we worked through it.
Buyers and sellers needed to negotiate per-listing with photo sharing, but users were often on slow or intermittent maritime internet connections, causing dropped messages.
We built a local write-ahead queue on top of Firestore so messages persist on-device and sync once connectivity returns, with delivery receipts to confirm the other side actually got it.
Web, iOS and Android all needed the exact same listing, search and auth logic — building it three times would have meant three places for bugs to diverge.
We defined one versioned REST contract early and held every client to it, with Jasmine and Crashlytics in CI to catch contract drift before it shipped.
Vessel search needed combinations like tonnage range + lease term + region that generic e-commerce filter libraries weren't built for.
We hand-rolled a composite Firestore index strategy for the most common filter combinations, cutting median search response time well under a second.
"Codomotive already understood our industry from earlier projects, which meant we skipped months of explaining shipping logistics from scratch. The marketplace launched on time and our brokers were using it within a week.