February 15, 1999

Raise the siren: 1998's Firefighter of the Year earns kudos for taking on quality control

InfoWorld's Product of the Year issue is full of hot products and technologies that deserve recognition. Be sure to check out the awards from the InfoWorld Test Center, where you will find products that helped make IT a success in 1998.

However, it's the people who implement, administer, and manage these products who deserve the real recognition. After all, leveraging what these products and technologies have to offer requires a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and time in the trenches and behind the scenes. For the average troubleshooter, life is but a series of annoying tweaks.

And that's where our Firefighter of the Year award comes into play. It goes to that heroic IT person who solved a challenging IT-related problem. I've been soliciting nominations for several weeks now, and I have received some great three-, four-, and five-alarm stories. Thanks to all of you folks who get all of these products and technologies to actually work together. We could never award a product or a technology without acknowledging the effort from the people who put it together in the real world, so you certainly deserve recognition from us.

Our Firefighter of the Year award for 1998 goes to Scott Anderson, associate director of IS at Total Travel Management, in Troy, Mich. Scott is responsible for all software architecture and programming for one of the top 10 travel agencies in the United States. Scott started programming in 1981, and he supports more than 500 employees in more than 25 offices across the country.

Scott's problem was rather straightforward. Executing company reports took too long. Report execution ranged anywhere from 15 minutes to 4 hours. In addition, many reports were simply incorrect. Scott earns our award by reducing the execution time of the reports to 3 to 5 seconds.

Scott manages the software of an automated quality control system, which inspects travel reservation records for the correct information, such as credit card, date, and itinerary validation. This application is provided by a company that writes strictly in Microsoft FoxPro 2.5. It's evident that the travel industry's third-party software lags behind, but according to Scott, there are no other alternatives.

The quality control system generates reports, which provide arrival and departure lists for users in the organization. Another report provides critical traveler information in case of an emergency. These emergency reports are generated from Scott's system because major computer reservation system mainframes, such as Worldspan and Sabre, typically lock their databases when a disaster occurs.

Scott's original quality control system used Microsoft Access to prepare the reports, running against the FoxPro tables linked from a file server. Again, this method could take from 15 minutes to more than 4 hours, and it often returned incorrect and incomplete information. The worst part was that remote users also required the reports. They implemented Symantec PC Anywhere to receive reports by remote control, but performance was awful. I can't imagine running a file-based database report over a slow dial-up link.

So what did Scott do to fix the quality control system so reports did not take forever to run and were correct? Scott's solution was to use Sequiter Software's CodeBase, a C/C++ database access library for Xbase files. It includes a set of API calls to open Xbase databases and execute queries. In addition, Scott ported his solution to Linux. The port was rather easy because Sequiter provides the source code for Unix versions.

Scott's final step consisted of an Apache server running mod_jserv, which is an open-source Java servlet module or engine for Apache. This servlet manages HTML form presentation for the reports. An end-user simply enters the report parameters, and the servlet then calls the Codebase application with those parameters, which in turn extracts the report information. In the end, the servlet presents the data as an HTML table or a PDF file.

In terms of details, Scott used a shell execute for the C program. He did not use Java Native Interface, or JNI, because he wanted to prevent memory leaks from the native code interface. The FoxPro files themselves are linked to the Linux box with NetWare Core Protocol, or NCP, drivers.

Given an outstanding execution time of 3 to 5 seconds and correct reports, remote users can even dial up over a 14.4Kbps link with no degradation in performance. Scott's solution is running on a Pentium 90 with 64MB of RAM. His original Access-based solution ran on a Pentium II 300.

Are Scott's users happy? Absolutely, especially the disaster response team. You never know when a disaster will strike, and they can now easily run their reports from home. Congratulations, Scott!

---

InfoWorld Test Center Technical Director Laura Wonnacott has been working with computers for 15 years. Send questions to testcenter_rx@infoworld.com.

Got a tough technical question? Ask it in the forum.

Missed a column? Go back for more.

---

Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.