Visual WebGui Showcases

Torq Software chose Visual WebGui and soon enough discovered how easy it was to start developing Visual WebGui screens. "Not having to learn ASP.NET in its entirety meant that we could leverage our existing knowledge for most part to produce an effective application".

Overview
Torq Software is a software development company located north of Perth, Western Australia. The company focuses on developing and maintaining software products.

Iris Web is a web based user interface into the Iris Debt Collection Management System. It records the collection jobs a Debt Collection Agency has been instructed to work on throughout the job life cycle and information relating to the job. This includes borrower information, notes on the progress, costs incurred, invoicing status etc.

Iris Web allows all parties in the debt collection management life cycle to communicate and collaborate on the job via an Internet Web interface. This includes the finance company client, job coordinators, managers and field agents.

The customer has an existing Windows Forms based application that is used internally and still is. External parties such as field agents logged into the system using remote desktop technology. The remote desktop approach worked well but had technical, licensing and financial issues related to scaling to more concurrent remote users. The issues were in the areas of printer management, bandwidth usage, VPN set up on the client side and corporate firewall issues with larger clients that wished to use their systems remotely.

Business needs
Torq Software decided to allow web access the internal systems so that they can be accessed by more field agents and clients via the internet with a manageable impact on the processor and bandwidth usage footprint. It was important to allow that remote access without the need to install software on external machines and to provide clients that have corporate firewalls with access over port 80.

It was important to provide field agents and clients with a scalable remote system access for a workflow that involved multiple parties from different organizations while presenting a Web UI (user interface) that is familiar to the existing user base and easy to learn for new users.

As most projects, it was necessary to minimize the initial development costs for a web based front end to an existing system so it was important not to incur a technology ramp up associated with learning ASP.NET as the team looked to be able to use the same core architecture as an existing Windows Forms application.

The Solution
The team chose Visual WebGui RIA Platform and soon enough discovered how easy it was to start developing Visual WebGui screens due to the fact that it uses the same GUI designer technology that was already used to develop the Windows Forms version of the application. Furthermore, the application was already structured as layers of functionality: foundation, mapping, domain model, reports and user interface. Some changes were needed at the foundation layer to allow for multiple Visual WebGui sessions running in the same IIS process. The layered structure that was already in place remains, but now with multiple UI layer options: Windows Forms and Visual WebGui.

It was relatively easy to develop the screens for the application as the existing Windows Forms UI was used as a guide. Even though Visual WebGui was still in a beta form, the overall development was simple and quicker than expected. "Not having to learn ASP.NET in its entirety meant that we could leverage our existing knowledge for most part to produce an effective application" Said Apolon Ivankovic. Deployment turned out to be relatively easy as well and only required the team to learn the basics of IIS deployment.

Benefits
The Visual WebGui implementation allowed the customer to scale the number of external people that interacted remotely with their software systems. The new web based application also allowed closer and better clients' interaction via web browser based technologies for their common workflow.

In addition, Iris Web provided remote access to applications for clients without having to deal with corporate firewall issues and at the same time providing bullet-proof security benefits since the entire processing and logic is done on the server. It also reduced the issues associated with printer drivers on the RDP server.

The Visual WebGui based interface, though not identical to the Windows application, provided very similar metaphors and form concepts which eased the transition to the web based user interface. Visual WebGui also simplified the job for the development team since it enabled to re-use the existing application architecture and their Windows Forms development expertise.

Screen shots
List of jobs assigned to a particular job coordinator. The background color and font properties provide an indication of the type of job and its current state:

Detail screen for a job - i.e. contains all of the details and history for a particular debt collection job. Different forms of information are present in each of the tabs in the job. Notice that the toolbar icons have a mix of normal icon colours and a washed out colour indicating that the toolbar button has been disabled. The toolbar buttons are only enabled in the context in which they can be used – either logically or based on the authorization level of the logged in person:

Field agents' worksheet printout - Provides quick summary information on a job in a report/printout form:

Clicking on the address label for any address in the system brings up a Google map for its location:

Job search screen:

A list of all of the financial institution clients known to the system and the contacts within those organizations. The same organization/people tree view based control is used for displaying the clients, agents, coordinators, tow companies and storage companies known to the system.