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The Client
The engineering department of a major aerospace firm.
The Project
OCI provided technical evaluation of commerical and open source products, design, development, testing, documentation, mentoring, and ongoing expertise for an application framework that serves as the foundation of a unified analysis suite.
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The Problem
The engineering department of a large company developed several specialized applications over the past 20 years. These disparate programs didn't standardize on user interfaces, and features overlapped significantly between them. Incompatibilities between data structures and file formats made data interchange challenging. The customer wanted to consolidate the infrastructure of these applications into a modular framework, in order to reduce duplication, simplify maintenance and speed development of future applications. |
The Solution
The client engaged OCI to help them design or select a framework that would best meet their needs. Although we also considered developing a custom framework, it was clear that this would increase development costs and provide no substantial competitive value over the commercial and open source application frameworks. Following a competitive evaluation of the available frameworks, OCI staff found that the open source NetBeans Platform was the best choice since it is a mature, proven technology and allowed the client to directly reuse code from their significant portfolio of Java Swing applications while allowing integration of both commercial and open source libraries. We worked with the client to select appropriate open source and commercial products and technologies to support a best practices solution, including:
- Java
- Java3D
- NetBeans Platform
- JFreeReport
- JFreeChart
- XStream
- Ehcache
- iText
- Apache POI
- Apache Ant
- Hudson
- InnoSetup
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Services provided
- Architecture consultation
- Technology evaluation
- Gap analysis to identify requirements unfulfilled by selected components
- Software design, development, testing, deployment, and support
- Management of the development, build, and test environment
- Mentoring of development staff
- Refactoring of existing application code into the new framework
Benefits of solution
- Use of mature open source technologies
- Modular architecture to facilitate new features as business needs dictate
- Ability to easily deploy incremental application updates over the network
- Involvement in the key open source projects to ensure client needs were met
- Test-driven software development model, including continuous integration and testing
- Configuration and release management
- Software development processes based on well-established, routine procedures and well-defined performance objectives and standards
- Use of a common source code repository across a geographically disbursed team
- Extensive in-code developer documentation
- Regular and effective communication with project stakeholders
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Results
The project has been a resounding success. In addition, other teams in the same organization found that they have similar needs. To address this most effectively, we identified features common to all of these applications and factored them out into a customized enhancement of the NetBeans Platform. Instead of simply sharing code, this approach allowed the teams to share maintenance, documentation and make improvements available to all applications built on this platform. Furthermore, by using the same environment for building, testing and deploying applications, developers are able to switch between teams more easily.
Contact Information
To learn how OCI can help you streamline your development efforts, visit http://www.ociweb.com or contact sales@ociweb.com today.
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