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Previous failures, a complex application, and a dubious user community are ingredients that typically do not bode well for the future of a project. The new development team needed something special to turn this project around.

EAServer and PowerBuilder Bring Progress
At the beginning of this project iteration, the development environment was almost exclusively based on Informix. It used an Informix database, Informix 4GL, and the recruiting application used Informix client/server technology. The new team had some leeway in choosing the development tools, but no control over the database selection.

After extensive analysis they began development with Sybase PowerBuilder connecting to the Informix database. Sybase PowerBuilder was an easy selection because of its rapid development capabilities. An unresolved question was whether to take a client/server or a three-tier approach. As Werner relates, this was a key decision, "When I came into the group, it was already known that we would use Sybase PowerBuilder. We actually began writing the code taking a client/server approach, thinking we were going to seamlessly be able to move into a three-tier world. We learned that really wasn't going to happen."

They decided to move to a three-tier approach using Sybase EAServer. Werner was an experienced Sybase PowerBuilder developer, but this was his first exposure to Sybase EAServer. After reading Taming Jaguar by Jason Weiss and Michael Barlotta, Werner was surprised at how easy it was to create three-tiered applications with Sybase PowerBuilder. "I read some of the fundamentals, then I sat down and wrote my first Sybase PowerBuilder component. I was really impressed with how straightforward it was to write a component, deploy it to Sybase EAServer, and have it functioning in a very minimal amount of time. It is an extremely rapid process."

Pressure to Produce
The project had its share of headaches. Within three months after they started coding, the customer wanted a demonstration. The team had only one of the major modules partially coded. After frenzied development, they were able to demonstrate functionality to the customer. Due to the political pressures stemming from the earlier failures, this pattern of breakneck development would repeat itself throughout the project. Rapid development and rapid deployment became integral to the project's survival. Karl Werner remembers the intense pressure to deliver, "We deployed at an amazing rate; normally I would expect a project of this magnitude to be deployed over the course of about a year. Instead, we deployed over three and a half months. We went from no load to full load in a very short time. Nevertheless, working with Sybase we were able to get things resolved and be successful."

Full load meant rolling out to 122 sites with 15,000 users tracking 45,000 students. After the deployment had been in the field for 18 months, another issue came to a head. The Informix database they had been mandated to use was the weak link in the solution. They were using ODBC between Sybase EAServer and Informix and they kept running into thread-safety issues with ODBC. The team made a case for replacing the Informix database with Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise. According to Karl Werner it was a timely conversion, "At this time we had Sybase PowerBuilder clients, connecting to Sybase EAServer running PowerBuilder components, and then EAServer used ODBC to connect to Informix. We were finally able to bring in Sybase ASE and switch over. Once we switched to Sybase ASE, everything started working together. We were able to dramatically improve the performance and stability of the systems by changing the back-end database. Sybase ASE on the back end has really been the final piece that makes us a nearly 24/7 shop now."

Sybase EAServer Seamlessly Handles Fat Clients and Web Access
Moving to a three-tier architecture with Sybase EAServer as the middle tier greatly expanded the developers' flexibility in supporting the customer. The same Sybase PowerBuilder components on Sybase EAServer could concurrently support both PowerBuilder clients and Web-based clients. A central server site ties 122 training centers together and the suite of applications use delivery methods that best suit the needs of the end user.

The main student information tracking application uses a Sybase PowerBuilder client that communicates through a wide area network with Sybase EAServer. The network's security and speed were very compatible with a fat client approach. The student recruiting and post-training placement applications are Web-based; Sybase EAServer feeds information to Microsoft IIS servers that construct and deliver the Web pages. Sybase EAServer also communicates with the transaction-based legacy payroll system by creating flat files of transactions and sending them to the payroll system.

Sybase EAServer was easy to learn and gave the architecture an inherent agility. The middle tier provided a mechanism for maintaining reusable business objects. The business objects manage and transform information that is ultimately rendered at a different level, based on the destination client.

Sybase PowerBuilder - Survival of the Fastest
Sybase PowerBuilder makes an excellent companion technology for Sybase EAServer. Sybase PowerBuilder knowledge is quickly applied to Sybase EAServer's middle tier. Sybase EAServer works equally well with other languages like Java or C++, but the team required an extremely rapid application development environment to deliver success on this project.

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