Appeon Rapidly Web-enables Key Products
For a Fortune Global 100 Company
Business
Challenge |
To
meet the demands of customers, an ISV needs to enable its existing
client-server product for the Web |
| Solution |
Appeon 2.8
for PowerBuilder |
| Results |
- Highly reliable, Java standards-based application architecture.
- Implementation time a small fraction of that required to rewrite
for other Web platforms.
- Familiar, rich, and productive client-server interface maintained.
|
| Industry |
ISV |
About Shengli Software
Sinopec is the second largest petroleum producer in Mainland China and
a Fortune Global 100 company. To take advantage of its extensive experience
in petroleum production, Sinopec formed a high-tech subsidiary, Shengli
Software Ltd., to provide software-related products and services to the
petroleum industry.
Combining industry experience with R&D efforts to develop competitive
petroleum industry software, Shengli has aggressively developed its external
market while taking advantage of a stable internal market with Sinopec.
Shengli knows that in order to keep growing its business at a rapid pace,
it needs to meet customer demands for the most effective and up to date
technology solutions.
We Need to Move to the Web, But How Do We Get There?
"Converged Petroleum Investment Project Management System"
(CPIPMS) is an application developed by Shengli for petroleum industry
investment project management. The application includes company, oilfield,
and factory-level management, with specialized oilfield investment project
management functionality as well as for general investment project management
functionality. The application is used by Sinopec subsidiaries across
China.
The application was built by a team of three engineers working over four
years from 2001 to 2004, representing 12 engineering-years of investment.
Originally, Shengli chose Sybase's PowerBuilder to build CPIPMS for its
high development productivity.
But by 2004, the client-server architecture of the original application
began to show its weaknesses. With the rapid proliferation of the Web
in China, users had come to expect the ability to access the system at
any time and place. This was especially true for projects in the petroleum
industry, which typically involve multiple organizations in different
locations that all need to access the system. The original client-server
application could only be accessed from machines where the client software
was installed, creating deployment hassles and security concerns for many
users. Moving to the Web was rapidly becoming a competitive necessity.
On the other hand, the company did not want to throw away its substantial
investment in the development of the new application and start from scratch.
Shengli had estimated that it would take several years to rewrite the
application in Java. In addition, the application contained many PowerBuilder
Windows and DataWindows with powerful functionalities that are extremely
difficult to replicate with mainstream Web user interface technologies.
The user interface of the finished application would have to be changed
substantially to accommodate the limitations of these technologies.
Appeon Offers the Best of Both Worlds
Is there a way to move our application and development organization to
the Web without throwing away our existing investment in PowerBuilder
skills and applications? Answering this question became a high priority
for Shengli's decision makers.
In choosing a Web strategy, Shengli considered a great number of factors.
Major considerations included:
- Time: Traditionally, migrating a client-server application
to the web has involved a complete rewrite from scratch. The difficulty
is great, it takes a long time, and the existing investment in the original
application is entirely wasted.
- Usability: PowerBuilder provides rich, highly productive
user interface controls that users had come to expect. The common platforms
for Web development limit users to a very simple page-based interface,
which was not desirable to Shengli's customers due to the negative impact
on user productivity.
- Deployment: Shengli's customers typically had end
users distributed over different locations, and these customers were
asking for a solution that would not require software to be deployed
to the machines of individual users.
- Reliability: To meet the high standards of petroleum
industry customers, Shengli needed to deliver a solution with bulletproof
reliability even over network connections that were occasionally slow
or unstable.
- Maintainability: The Web application needed a good
maintenance process. In addition, Shengli was continuing to support
the original client-server application, and did not wish to maintain
two code bases.
In March 2004, Shengli's engineers encountered the Appeon for PowerBuilder
solution by chance on the Internet.
Appeon for PowerBuilder (APB) is the only product that can automatically
migrate a traditional PowerBuilder client-server architecture application
to the Web. Based on the original client-server application source code,
APB automatically creates an n-tier Web application. The migrated application
precisely replicates the rich user interface of the original application,
including powerful DataWindow functionality, a multi-window interface,
and advanced printing capabilities. The migrated application possesses
the scalability, security, reliability, flexibility, and other benefits
of an n-tier network architecture. Because the entire process is automatic,
there is no need to spend time understanding the application business
logic, which greatly cuts down migration effort.
Technical Architecture
The solution provided by Appeon possesses the following characteristics:
- A single CPIPMS PowerBuilder code base deploys to both client-server
and Web architectures.
- The deployed Web application is an n-tier Java and Web standards-based
application:
(1) The client-side presentation layer uses only pure HTML, XML,
and JavaScript. The new application does not require browser plug-ins,
ActiveX, Java applets, or other downloads to the client machine.
(2) Server-side presentation and business logic is contained within
the Sybase EAServer Java Application Server
(3) Application data is stored in the existing CPIPMS database
and accessed through JDBC
- The application uses only standard HTTP over port 80, making
it interoperable with existing firewall and security infrastructure
without special configuration.
- The report printing functionality of the original client-server
application is preserved using the Adobe Portable Document Format
(PDF) printing capabilities of Appeon for PowerBuilder, avoiding
the hassles that usually come along with printing on the Web.
|
|
Figure 1: Appeon Web Application Architecture |
Shengli was so impressed with Appeon as a migration solution, the company
decided to go ahead with Appeon to develop a new suite of software, "Oilfield
Project Management Information System". By leveraging its existing
PowerBuilder skills, Shengli has estimated that it will need to spend
only three months to complete the new project. If Shengli had switched
to Java, the project would have taken at least twice as many developers
and twice as much time. And Shengli's software engineers greatly appreciated
that the usefulness of the PowerBuilder skills that they already mastered
can be extended onto the Web, using the same mature and familiar development
platform.
Most importantly, Shengli immediately recognized the value of the new
platform could provide to its customers. End users can just enter a URL
in their web browser and start working immediately. The highly productive
user interface is almost exactly the same as before, eliminating the need
for customers to retrain end users. And concerns about scalability, security
and reliability that were raised with the client-server application are
completely addressed by the n-tier Web architecture.
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