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Summer 2001
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Today, there are thousands - millions - of organisations across the world which are “Web-enabled”. In other words, their operation - to one extent or another - makes use of a Web-based application. But there are many more which don’t. Why? After all, the benefits can be enormous.
For some, of course, use of the Internet may be simply inappropriate. But they are an ever-shrinking minority. Much more often, the reason is connected with the perceived difficulty and expense of developing an application with the required functionality. “I can see the advantages in principle,” we hear people say, “but the process is just too costly and confusing. I can’t take the risk.”Until recently, there might have been some justice in this view. Not any more, though. Because now there’s jBASE for Web Builders (jWB), from jBASE Software, a product which - despite the fact that it is the most powerful, flexible and scalable Web development tool in the world - is incredibly easy to use. In fact, it’s been designed to be so, from the ground up.
One user who can testify to this is Liz Oxburgh, Analyst Programmer at Exeter City Council, who has had recent, and extensive, experience of the jBASE product. “I was pleasantly surprised at just how easy jWB is to use,” she said, “even for a novice like myself. We – and therefore, Exeter’s Council Tax payers - will certainly see significant benefits from the implementation of Web applications via the jBASE technology.”
So, what exactly did Exeter City Council need? And why jWB? Perhaps the best place to start is at the beginning.
Exeter is the regional capital of Devon, and its City Council provides a variety of services to its 111,000 citizens. These include social housing, environmental health, parks and gardens, refuse collection, and planning consents. The Council’s expenditure is about £50m per annum gross, and around £11.5m net. At the heart of its financial management, Exeter has a powerful UNIX-based system, which offers all the usual facilities, such as commitment accounting and budget profiling. Although it has helped the Council maintain a high level of control and accountability since 1989, it is also beginning to show signs of ageing. For example, the front-end is typical green screen, which carries a rather faded look.
Cosmetics apart, there were also one or two operational difficulties beginning to emerge by the end of 2000. One of these was the monthly Stewardship Reports. Or, more precisely, printing the Stewardship Reports - which is a more important issue than it might seem at first glance. This is because, for those not intimate with the terminology of local government, the Stewardship Reports are used to track income and expenditure against budget and commitments. They allow all the budget holders within the Council - approximately 60 managers, in Exeter’s case - to report accurately to the Service Directors and Council Members. Referred to (at least) monthly, it is essential that they are clear and easy to read.
And there was the rub. Because the reports were too wide to be viewed on-screen, they had to be printed out every time. But a foible of the Exeter system meant that printing anything wider than 80 characters was a major chore for its users. Worse, selection of the report level and detail was very laborious. However, a solution was soon to occur to Liz Oxburgh. Having recently completed a major project to migrate all 70 of Exeter’s applications from Reality to jBASE Software’s database environment, she knew the company also offered a Web application development tool. Perhaps the Stewardship Reports could be transferred to Exeter’s Intranet and used as a Web application. It was, she felt, worth looking into.
“After all,” she commented, “people who aren’t computer experts are more comfortable with the Web than they are with text-based, command-line environments. If we could make the Stewardship Reports available via our Intranet, it would make a huge difference. However, I admit I had a slight anxiety in terms of developing the application. Although I have good BASIC skills, my experience of languages such as dynamic HTML and JavaScript was at best minimal, and I had no knowledge whatever of jWB.”
Due to the simplicity of jWB, the process of application development turned out to be much less complicated than Liz had feared. In fact, in under a week, she had succeeded in implementing her first Web application and, in the following week or so, finished off the reports. Now, they are simplicity itself to produce and very easy to read. They can be viewed on screen and printed via the Windows default printer.
So, what was actually involved? How easy was it for Liz Oxburgh to learn to use jWB effectively? She outlined the principal steps: “Because the product is based on objects, designing a page involves using a GUI front end to move objects into a grid. The objects are of various types - combo boxes, text labels, etc - and once it is moved onto a page, it can be accessed by clicking on it. Its properties then appear and can be amended. For instance, to display a range of values in a drop-down list, they can be listed explicitly, or loaded from a file on the jBASE database or from the results of a sub-routine. To load them from a file, jWB just needs to know the filename, the fields to display, and a query to define which records are required.”
“Once I was happy with the page, I had to link one page to the next using dynamic HTML. As I’m a Web novice, this was the first time that I realised that there is no concept of a Web session. Each page goes off with just what you tell it and comes back with no memory of where it came from. We chose to add data packages to the end of the URL, so the page had to be ready to receive these data packages. To send those packages on further, you can hide them in the page or you can make use of jWB’s integral session data scratchpad.”
“The final part of putting it all together is adding a pre-page process to get the data from the jBASE database for display. This is done using BASIC sub-routines compiled on the jWB server. The sub-routine is basically the same as used in the green screen application. All of the screen handling statements are stripped out and the error handling routines amended.”
So was it all plain sailing? “Yes, I’d say it was,” concluded Liz. “The only difficulties were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the same as the difficult bits in any project – that’s to say the thinking and the planning. There isn’t an exact correspondence between what you do with a green screen and what you can do with a Web page, and at times I felt that I was coding things that in six months time would look awkward and difficult to maintain. But considering I’d - at this stage - been exposed to JavaScript for hours rather than days, I was pleased with the results. We were able to utilise our existing security model with ease and we didn’t encounter anything which could be described as a significant problem.”
In fact, so impressed was Liz Oxburgh with jWB, that she intends to use it again, to improve the Council’s management of its COSHH (Control Of Substances Hazardous to Health) database and indeed other applications. While Exeter’s system fulfils legal requirements, the Council has also recognised that it could be greatly improved, in terms of ease-of-use and efficiency.
“As things stand, all environmental health data, such as dangerous chemical usage etc., is recorded manually. Paper forms are filled in by hand, by the contractor, or other user, and have to be re-keyed by us into the central system. With a Web-based application we could make the process significantly more efficient by allowing the forms to be filled on-screen, nearer the point of use, then uploaded automatically. I see this as another perfect application for jWB - this time with the added dimension of form filling.”
jBASE Software Limited
Last Updated: 20 Jul 2001