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Genisys Reservation Systems ( http://www.genisys.com ) is a leading developer of software solutions for the travel industry. The company's flagship product, the Genisys System, is a fully automated reservation system, which automates the ground transportation reservation process. Although today not all travel reservations are made online, over 90% of all hotel and airline reservations are processed electronically by three companies — Sabre, Worldspan and Apollo. Genisys software products allow the users of Sabre, Worldspan or Apollo to secure limousine reservations from a worldwide pool of limousine providers. Ground transportation is a multi-billion dollar facet of the travel industry. As this industry sector is migrating towards online and real time reservation systems the solution providers’ arena is becoming very competitive. Genisys latest product — Genisys R/TÒ is the first product on the market to provide real time interface between the clients of the major travel reservation companies and multiple limousine providers.
Genisys R/T® allows any travel agent using a computer reservation system, such as Sabre, Worldspan or Apollo, to deliver real-time ground transportation reservation requests to a pool of service providers. The reservation request is passed by Genisys to the provider's back office system where it searches for a rate, pickup time and authentic confirmation number. The order, including information gathered directly from the provider, is then returned by Genisys to the agent, where it is written back to the Passenger Name Record database.
Design Considerations The system was implemented utilizing Sybase toolset and included PowerBuilder and Java components hosted in Enterprise Application Server. The Object and Data modeling was performed using PowerDesigner. The Sybase toolset was selected due to a number of factors below. Reliability — The real-time system has to be in operation 24/7. Any downtime results in immediate loss of income. The client had used EAServer in previous systems and was comfortable in the Application Server’s ability to function in a 24/7 environment. Time to Market — Because of the fierce competition time to market was a major concern. Selecting PowerBuilder for component designed allowed the client to utilize the RAD features that made PowerBuilder famous in the Client Server environment to deploy the application on time and within budget. In-House Expertise — While performance, reliability and time to market were certainly important to application’s success, without question the ongoing support was the key in gaining customers confidence and developing new business. Genisys has a staff of developers with experience in PowerBuilder and comprehensive business knowledge of ground transportation industry. Their staff was in best position to offer support and build confidence in the product. For this reason PowerBuilder was given preference for the component design.
As with any project several unforeseen issues came up during the implementation cycle of the project. The EAServer / PowerBuilder architecture was put through the toughest test. Bottom line, when our backs were against the wall, Sybase toolset came through on every promise. We were able recover from unforeseen obstacles and deploy the project within budget and minimal schedule impact. Two specific issues stand out as an example. Secure Socket Communications Module The reservation request data contains client’s home address, pickup/departure time, credit card information and other sensitive information. A key requirement was for the communication to be accomplished through a Secure Socket Layer. The information had to be encrypted and the destination of the transmission had to be authenticated. The initial design relied on an ActiveX component to provide secure socket communications. However during initial proof of concept testing we have found that the ActiveX component would not be able to meet the requirements. The component was originally designed to function in a Visual Basic environment with error handling and notification accomplished though an event driven interface. When deployed in EAServer we were no table to implement the error handling to our satisfaction. We were left searching for an alternative solution. This is when we were able to experience first hand the value of EAServer open platform support. Sybase EAServer is the only application server foundation that supports component models, which include J2EE, COM, CORBA, C/C++ and PowerBuilder. Not limited by a single language we had many alternatives. After evaluating several options based on reliability, cost and the affect on the schedule, we have settled on a solution offered by a Sun in JavaTM Secure Socket Extension (JSSE). JSSE is a free package offered by Sun for JDK 1.2 and 1.3 and is included in JDK 1.4. The JSSE Secure Socket component worked flawlessly. The interface between PowerBuilder components and the Java based component was completely transparent. PowerBuilder components were able to call the Java component as they would any other PowerBuilder component. Sybase EAServer Open Component Model has worked as advertised and offered us a way to recover from an unexpected limitation of the initial design. Multi-vendor interface and data validation As we began the implementation stage we have discovered that the Vendor Interface and Data Validation module has experienced an unexpected scope creep. The limousine reservation data comes from a travel agent or a data stream from one of the automated reservation systems. This data has to be validated, stored in the internal tracking database and then passed to a preferred limousine service provider. Each provider will process the reservation data, pass it to their back-office systems, and reply with confirmation data. The confirmation data is once again validated, stored in the internal tracking database and passed to the request originator. Data protocol specification was generated and every effort was made to fix the data mapping and validation rules. However when interfacing to an unlimited number of external vendors this task has proven to be challenging. On top of it all this was a multi-national system with validation rules varying by service provider’s country! As a result the data mapping interface and validation rule module had to be easily customized to account for unique requirements of a specific service provider. A separate code base meant growing maintenance and support expense as more vendors came onboard. This would severely limit the system scalability; we had to find an alternative. To solve this challenge we have relied on proven RAD capabilities of PowerBuilder. Specifically, we have leveraged the time proven datawindow. We have used the datawindow in two ways. One as a component in a data-mapping module. This provided a flexible map between the data sent to the provider and the fixed internal database structure. We have also utilized the dynamic nature of the datawindow engine to evaluate the validation expression stored as a string in the database. PowerBuilder has allowed us to create a dynamic, database driven data mapping and validation engine. A new service provider can be configured not only without any changes to the code base, but with zero application down time! All that is needed are a few changes in the database to accommodate for the exceptions to the standard data mapping and validation.
As an experienced team of system architects we are aware of a trend in the software tool industry of sales and marketing leading the engineering. Our reputation rests on seeing through the claims to the real world potential and limitations of each solution. For this reason we perform a "post-mortem" analysis of every project and examine whether the selected platform was able to deliver in the areas of performance, security, reliability, scalability, and time to market. We were pleased to determine that Sybase EAServer / PowerBuilder / Java based platform not only met the marketing claims, but in cases of Open Architecture and Rapid Application Design has exceeded our initial expectations.
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