Case Studies  
The partners of Futuresoft include the following;
Customer - Register of Encumbered Vehicles (REVS), Office of Fair Trading, New South Wales, Australia
Service – Web enable existing application and enhance value of existing investment


REVS is currently servicing their call centre through an AS/400 based registry application. This application utilizes green screen interfaces. The direction towards moving this application to a web based system has allowed call centre staff to provide existing services through web interfaces. This has also resulted in the added benefits of accessibility, portability, web services infrastructure and scalability. The primary activity of the call centre staff is to interact with REVS corporate account holders and the public on a daily basis in providing encumbrance details of vehicles and boats

The existing encumbrance application has been developed with the use of an application development tool, known as 2E from Computer Associates. This application development environment generates mainly a centralized application, meaning to be hosted on a single IBM OS/400 application server. The only user interface mechanism of this application is text based 5250 screens and they do not provide any required graphical capabilities. Also it does not allow remote access via protocols such as the Internet and its native user interfaces. The encumbrance application is data intensive and consists of millions of instances within it. The data is stored in a DB2 environment. The encumbrance application has interfaces to other external systems and they include; Victorian Roads Authority in Victoria, New South Wales Police, New South Wales Road Traffic Authority

The main objective of the development activity has been to provide current functionality in a form suitable for web based interactions using the Web Fast product. The current workflow has been improved where necessary and possible for ease of use by reducing the existing text based screens into a small number. It has improved the overall usability of the system and increased the productivity of the call centre staff.

The use of multiple tiers has been another important goal of this application development activity. The four main layers of the encumbrance application system are described below.
Client (call centre staff) Desktop
Web Handling Component
Application Services
Middleware Connectivity Services
Backend Server
Each call centre person has been provided with a desktop that has access to an Internet browser. This desktop shall be used to access the enhanced encumbrance application. The web-handling component shall receive requests from the client and commence communicating with the client as required. This component shall require the support and intelligence of the back end server to formulate responses for requests received. Client requests will be sent to the backend server for processing. The backend server for this encumbrance application is an IBM AS/400.

One of the design and development goals has been to use the backend server in the application development process without significant changes to its database, processes and infrastructure. This goal has been met. The components required for communication and conversations have been developed using the J2EE technology. This has allowed for portability of the encumbrance system in the future onto other environments, if necessary. The web-handling component also complies with the J2EE architecture, thus allowing for portability of the application.

In addition to portability, scalability, extensibility and re-usability has been considered as key design goals for the application development. The Web Fast product has allowed for maximum re-use of its components when implementing same services over other channels. The scalability and extensibility goals have also been achieved.

Following technologies were utilized in the development activity

J2EE, WebSphere, JSP, JDBC, Java 2, DB2, JMS and MQ Series

 
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