Upgrading of a Member Management System

The Client

The client is an American company providing consulting and contracting services. The customer has expanded its services to business consulting for Western companies and information technology support to the companies in China and Southeast Asia.

What the client wanted

The client previously owned a member management system based on Windows. The original system could manage members' information saved in SQL Server. For the sake of the end users' convenience, the customer desired a more flexible system running on both UNIX and Windows, and the database could be saved in Oracle and SQL Server. Shinetech was required to rewrite the code of data storage and data storage procedures from the system to database.

Approach

In the phase of the system framework design, we adopted the 3-layer structure:
In presentation layer, we used Deamweaver to develop the HTML pages. Smarty Template framework was used for abstraction layer between HTML & business logic. And we migrated the system from a SQL Server/Microsoft to an Oracle / UNIX environment.

In application layer, we coded the application with PHP and JavaScript. Although Zend WinEnabler for thread-safe use of PHP was used in the Microsoft environment, it can not run on Linux / Apache. We used Oracle 10g Application Server for high volume availability & security and ADOdb for the communication between the application layer and the database layer.

In database layer, data storage and storage procedures were migrated from SQL Server to Oracle 9i.

We adopted agile development methodology whose features included:

• Lightweight - allowed for easy response to changes downstream.
• Closed collaboration between the programmers and the business experts (include onsite if necessary).
• Frequent delivery of updated code, including new business-level functionality.
• Anticipation of future rework during coding.
• Documentation complied with the customer's standards.
• All work was performed using the BRD and feature requirements as a base.
• Change request forms were generated and distributed for modifications to the BRD.
• Welland's source code control server ran ¡°Perforce¡± software for versioning.
• Jobs were maintained to reflect feature-level requirements.
• Changelists reflected unit-level coding changes, and were associated with jobs.
• Individual source code files were stored with the history of all chronological changes.
  

Benefits

• Access to better control of the system.
• A flexible and scalable system.
• Convenient database migration.

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