Visual WebGui Case Studies

"Visual WebGui helped me to easily develop a web application with an intuitive interface, allowing to concentrate on… the business logic… and on the needs of the customers… The UI design is easy even for a non-designer." Luca Morelli

Overview
Luca Morelli is a .net applications development consultant for desktop, mobile and web applications and the migration of legacy applications to .net.

G-loc is a content management with parametric document layout and workflow definition for small medium companies that need to organize the approval of internal documents. The solution was built for another Software Vendor as a replacement of their desktop client-based solution.

Business needs
The customer had already had a client-based document management solution for their customers but they wanted to create a new web based solution with a user interface (UI) similar to desktop and to address some shortcoming of the older version.

It was important to maintain the look & feel of a Windows application UI which was believed to be important in smoothening the transition from a client application to a web application for some of the old customers who were used to working with Windows applications.

Therefore there was a need for a simple to use application, but highly customizable in the document layout and workflow rules since the company also found the need for document management software with the capability to define a custom set of fields that may vary according to each customer's requirements. As well as the ability to define a parametric workflow, allowing companies to validate economic and technical documents before use inside the company according to their rules.

The application should provide each customer with a customized type of documents, types of data, fields (with data coming generally from external programs) and set of rules. It should also allow configuring roles and workflows that are not very complex but unique for each of them, so there was a need for a solution that would allow configuration capabilities of the system to create and import documents based on their need and approve with their rules.

The Solution
After evaluating various Ajax frameworks such as the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit and Gaia Ajax for ASP.NET Visual WebGui was chosen because it could provide a desktop-like user experience and allowed to implementing additional functionalities over the original solution with ease and reduce the learning time for the user.

"Visual WebGui helped me to easily develop a web application with an intuitive interface, allowing to concentrate on the development of the business logic of the program and on the needs of the customers." Said Luca Morelli and added that "The UI design is easy even for a non-designer like me and solves the problem of manually handling the navigation issues."

With Visual WebGui the team realized that it was fairly easy to create the complex navigation user interface, just like in developing a desktop application. Debugging the web application created with Visual WebGui proved to be also a simple task compared to traditional web application. "I have been using Visual WebGui for several months now and the overall impression is great. Creating the program is easy and I can debug the web application as if I am working with a client application," said Luca Morelli who added that "The end user saw the program and was also very pleased from what they are getting."

Benefits
Using Visual WebGui for this project allowed to create a web based application while maintaining a user interface similar to the desktop without any specific efforts. This would increase the acceptance rate for current users whereas significantly reduce the learning time for those users.

In addition, Visual WebGui empowered the development team to add new functionality with a simpler web programming model. Normally designing an enterprise web application, with several pages is a complex task that requires serious resources. "Using the embedded mechanism to create dialogs, forms and user controls, the problem is solved and I can use the time to improve the business logic of the program and to add new features," noted Morelli.

The new web based solution which should replace the existing Visual Basic application provides ease of deployment over the client application as it eliminates the need to deploy the application on each PC and provides a simple centralized deployment on the server instead. "Using Visual WebGui we can deploy the application on the server only, perform upgrades and remote assistance from a single machine," commented Morelli.

Screenshots
In this page the different document type can be defined with the field type and the workflow that can manipulate documents of this type. For each phase of the workflow the users involved can be defined and their feedback can be entered.

The folders represent the structure of storage of the documents: the procedure may run based on user permissions, and the interface of the new document loading dialog is dynamically based on the document structure.

A list of all documents to evaluate: selecting one of them the interface dynamical shows the fields and the contents of the document, allowing the user to choose the valuation can give to the document, based on the current phase in the workflow of the document.