A Web-Enabled Application for EHS Management

The Client

During the last decade, sustainable development (SD) has evolved from an esoteric concept to a key principle embraced by a number of corporations, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. More and more companies have explored how it can integrate SD into its own business strategy. The client, who specialized in helping organizations focus on strategic EHS (environmental, health and safety) management and sustainable business practice, asked Abstract Technology to help him with the development work of the EHS management application.

What the client wanted

Rapid application development has undergone a transition over the last few years, with the migration of applications from traditional client/server design to the Internet. The customer owned an existing MS Access desktop application. It was urgent that the tool needed to be converted into a web-enabled application. The web-enabled application would provide a platform for some groups in a company that was going to develop SD strategy.

This application was intended to help companies understand the context of SD, provide a basis for developing an SD strategy, highlight opportunities to create business value and provide a roadmap for taking action. There were a number of specific capabilities the application provided to help companies get started on their journey toward SD, for instance, the tool could establish generic elements of sustainable business practices which provided a comprehensive basis for companies to select the desired scope. It would also enable companies to assess current status, formulate SD goals, analyse gap between the current and desired position, which provided the basis for developing action plans. Besides, it would be able to clarify the potential business value associated with particular SD initiatives and provide guidance and support development of an action plan.

Approach

The development of the project complied with RUP standard. Our engineers began with studying the existing desktop application and comprehensively understood the relevant business processes and functionality. After conceiving the user cases, we started the prototype design. The UI supported the dynamic change i.e. when the mouseover event wason any icon in the navigation, the relevant text would present in the main frame. The several EHS elements cycled through the interface at intervals.

Our delivery model was successfully utilized in this project. The whole system was divided into 3 layers according to the model. The Web Layer adopted the Struts framework and the persistent layer introduced EJB technology to make the system a real standard J2EE application. EJB proved itself a good criterion in the aspect of database access, transaction management and persistence management. Besides we added permission control to the system. The database was DB2 and the server was Weblogic.

Benefits

• The development cycle was greatly shortened by utilizing Abstract Technology's delivery model.
• The interfaces were clear, simple, intuitive and the system was easy to use with minimal training.
• The system's compatibility, stability and flexibility were guaranteed due to the adoption of EJB.

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