FinWin is a software company, specializing in software for financial companies / banks . Over 300 programs were made to cover the whole processes of the various office/task using Delphi in a file-server configuration. Now that the market demand is for Web-based applications the goal was to convert our applications, having to reenginering all the programs and to restructure the database architecture using ADO. So what tool use to migrate the applications ? ASP platform has the disadvantage that is not compiled ( and the users can so examine / modify the sources ), ASP-NET is to young and we were not satisfied of the support, native Java is too much at a low-level..so we tried IntraWeb.
Implementation
The first two months were terrific: not only to improve the product, but also to rethink the interfaces, the interactions between then and without specialized skills. But a good support, the solutions found reading the newsgroups solved more than a problem so after the initial period all went well and we finished the conversion before the scheduled time ( 15% less than we had expected ). We made few customizable programs, everyone hearing on a different TCPIP port, that incorporated the mainly funtcions : user authentication, database query ( thanks for the ideas take from the demo of Element5 ), reporting ( using a selfmade Rave-server ), management of lookup tables, a file upload server , directional reporting ( using a ContorCube activex component ) and other specialized programs.
Impact
The technician now are able to produce complete programs very fast and the applications are very user friendly. We enjojed the Intraweb feature that let us convert stand-alone applications in services / page mode applications without efforts.The response of the market is so positive that we think to increase our organization. The installation/ support cycle is more complex but now is possibile to view the customers data without moving from our desks&and is a great deal for discover user data-entry mistakes.
Technology
Tools: IntraWeb, Delphi, ADO, ContourCube, Rave
Other tools evaluated: ASP, ASP.NET, Java
Number of developers: 1 engineer+ 1 “web” programmer + 1 programmer + 1 graphic
Time to develop and test: 6 month