In-Depth
SOA Keeps the Water Flowing
Mainframe migration facilitates construction of wells in southwest Florida. The SOA winner in the RDN Innovator Awards.
SOA: Southwest Florida Water Management District
When residential or commercial developers in southwest Florida need to get a permit to construct a well, they go to the Southwest Florida Water Management District, known locally in the region surrounding Tampa as "the District." That process can involve a lot of back and forth, including trips to district offices to submit paper-based forms.
Now the District has completed the first phase of a three-stage project -- called Water Management Information System (WMIS) -- to automate and streamline the paper- and time-intensive well-construction permitting process. Behind the new system: the retirement in 2010 of the IBM mainframe that has handled permitting and water usage in the District for years.
While the District had the option of moving its legacy systems to a new mainframe, it opted for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. The solution ties together disparate Cobol applications, Oracle databases, an enterprise content-management repository and a geographic information system from Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Inc.
The District's implementation and long-term strategy for utilizing Microsoft's .NET Framework has earned WMIS the Redmond Developer News 2008 Innovator Award in the SOA category. Since implementing phase one, well-construction permitting (WCP), the District has had 86 percent of its nearly 17,000 permits processed electronically, according to statistics provided by the District. The broad adoption saved a lot of time and money for the District and contractors alike, and is also yielding more reliable data.
"We can get a better picture of what's getting permitted; that's something we could never do before," says Steve Dicks, manager of mapping and geographical information systems (GIS) at the District and one of the effort's key sponsors. "We have to handle a lot less permits in-house and we can now do some risk management in permitting."
In terms of reducing costs, the District says the WCP phase has saved the equivalent of one staff person's time over a year.
The next phase of the project, water-use permitting, is now in test mode and set to be rolled out by January 2009. The third phase will be environmental-resource permitting; it'll be followed by the deployment of a system that monitors rainfall and overall water quality. With WCP, says Dicks, "we've laid the foundation."
Winner Profile |
Category: SOA
Organization: Southwest Florida Water Management District
Description: Agency that governs water management built a SOA to replace a legacy system aimed at automating the permit application and approval process, while providing Web access and supporting geospatial data
Key innovation: Used Microsoft .NET to create a SOA to integrate Unix, Linux and host-based systems
Summary of tools: Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with C# and ASP.NET; Infragistics NetAdvantage for ASP.NET; CodeSmith Tools template-driven code generator; DataDirect Shadow RTE; Embarcadero ER/Studio; Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect UML tool; ESRI ArcGIS geospatial components and tools; Oracle SQL Developer and Warehouse tools
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Iterative Methodology
The effort dates back to 2005, when the team decided that C# offered a more structured and consistent development environment than Visual Basic (VB), says Clint Wood, the District's application manager.
"It gave some of the niceties of Java without the baggage of Java," Wood says. He adds that those developers who preferred C# tended to be more pragmatic in their programming than those partial to VB.
Based on an iterative dev methodology and targeting 74 specific requirements, the project was initially modeled using Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect. The developers identified 328 potential changes -- of which 280 were actually implemented -- ranging from color display to app behavior and UI design. Among the key challenges in building the SOA were integration of disparate systems, finding and retaining developers skilled in .NET and Visual Studio, and the cultural change that was brought about in the move from green screens. Getting different groups to agree on business rules was an additional challenge, officials say.
The 2010 deadline colored the team's decision making, so while Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 is expected to ship by year's end with support for GIS data types, the team opted to port the host-based data running on an IBM DB2 mainframe database to Oracle 9i. Says Victor Castor, a project manager with Plato Consulting Inc., which provided developer resources for the District: "We already have skills with Oracle; that seems to be a good fit with our development group."
The team created scripts to perform the migration using Oracle's Warehouse Builder tool, he adds. The group is currently upgrading the core database to Oracle 10g, now that ESRI has all the Service Packs needed to support that release.
Ditching the Mainframe
Why didn't the agency opt to simply upgrade the mainframe, continue to host the GIS repository on big iron and use .NET to link the disparate systems together with an enterprise message bus? Such a model did not make sense and was arguably overkill, says Wood. He points to his long history overseeing IBM mainframe applications for companies such as the drugstore chain Eckert and Chase Manhattan Bank, where millions of prescriptions and credit-card transactions, respectively, are processed each day. At the District, transactions number more in the thousands per day, Wood says.
The key benefit to any SOA is the ability to reuse code across applications, and ultimately across silos and organizational boundaries. Wood estimates that 35 percent of the Web services developed for the initial permitting app are reusable. Many of the geospatial data types likewise can be shared, along with database structures such as contractor data.
With the SOA building blocks in place, the District appears well poised to meet its objectives while meeting its deadline to sunset the mainframe. Says Dicks: failure is not an option. "We won't be one of those 70 percent of projects that fail."
Click on a category below on to learn more about the other winning entries in the 2008
RDN
Innovator Awards: