JBuilder Case Study: Microage, Inc.

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Case Study

MICROAGE, INC.
(ECadvantage)
Tempe, Arizona, USA

OVERVIEW
• MicroAge's strategic direction is to give customers full and direct access to information about their orders.

• MicroAge offers an electronic commerce application, ECadvantage, that streamlines the delivery of services and information to its customers.

• ECadvantage chose Inprise Corporation's Borland JBuilder and VisiBroker to quickly build an Internet Commerce prototype for an online order management application.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
• JBuilder's rapid application development environment enabled developers to complete a quality Internet Commerce application in less than six weeks time.

COMPANY BACKGROUND
MicroAge, Inc. is a Fortune 500 global technology services company providing distributed computing solutions and multivendor integration services to large organizations and 20,000 computer resellers worldwide. To supply them, MicroAge has built the largest quality integration center in the United States. The corporation also has a network of branches and alliance partners spanning 34 countries. Headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, MicroAge's 1997 annual revenues exceed $4.3 billion. ECadvantage, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of MicroAge, Inc. ECadvantage is a leading Internet commerce architecture that streamlines the delivery of services and information to customers.

SITUATION
MicroAge's end customers, a network of 20,000 resellers and a number of Fortune 500 direct-purchase clients, need rapid access to information about products and the status of orders on the mainframe system—product selection, price and warehouse availability, orders placed, and invoice information. The company instituted an electronic commerce solution via the Internet so customers could configure systems and place orders and now wanted to upgrade the system to offer real-time order status, invoice, and in-transit tracking information online.

ECadvantage is made up of a number of databases that give customers direct access to information they need, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. A great deal of collateral information is also available on line—data sheets, product images, detailed specifications on products—all features designed to make it easier for customers to do business with MicroAge.

The ECadvantage system provides instantaneous updates on more than 60,000 products, as well as critical, real-time data on pricing and availability. The ECadvantage system consists of 5 application servers and 4 main databases running on Compaq Proliant servers. The servers are load balancing and fully redundant.

SOLUTION
ECadvantage chose to build the application upon a Java/CORBA framework. Developers ran hands-on comparisons of leading Java development tools, including Inprise's Borland JBuilder, Symantec's Visual Café, IBM's Visual Age, Microsoft's Visual J++, and Sun's Java Development Kit. They chose JBuilder because of the tool's robustness and its 100% Java compliance. Developers also found that the integration of Inprise's VisiBroker CORBA technology was particularly well suited to serve as the back end communications vehicle for the system.

Using JBuilder with VisiBroker as a CORBA back end, the team created Java applets for Order Status, Invoice Inquiry and In-transit Tracking modules of the system in just six weeks. The production-grade modules performed business-critical tasks and accessed live databases from the four real-time, multi-platform, backend databases.

ECadvantage developers found that the ability to build real JavaBeans and deploy JAR files gave JBuilder a strong advantage over other tools. They report that the two-way switching between design mode and code added more productivity, and the comprehensive on-line Help was very effective. They especially liked the DataExpress components. With 8 to 10 screens in each application, and about 50 fields per screen, they could visually tie grids to datasets in no time. With other tools, all such connections had to be hand coded. JBuilder was very fast in producing prototypes for the end customer and enabled developers to respond with requested changes virtually on the spot. Additionally, JBuilder's capability to develop both applications and applets from the same code base gave developers maximum leverage on time invested.

TECHNOLOGY

Database server		Sybase on UNIX/NT and MS SQL Server on Windows NT
Platform		Any compatible browser
Network		Internet
Other technology		VisiBroker CORBA ORB on NT
Size of database		7 Gb
Number of users		30,000

DEVELOPMENT

Tool used		JBuilder Client/Server
Other tools evaluated		Symantec's Visual Café, Sybase's PowerJ, IBM's Visual Age, Microsoft's Visual J++, Sun's JDK
Team size		2 developers
Development time		Six weeks for the Order Management application (Order Status, Invoice Inquiry & In-transit Tracking)

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