WatchMark Corp.
Migrating applications to the Web
WatchMark Corp. provides innovative and scalable service assurance products to the leading names in wireless communications, including AT&T Wireless, Cingular, and Verizon in the United States, as well as firms in Europe and Asia. WatchMark products are used to provide clear, dependable wireless service for millions of subscribers by allowing network administrators to collect and analyze network data, and thereby maximize network performance and reduce churn.
Challenge
RF and traffic engineers, network operators, and management need real-time access to information about wireless network performance. These needs range from the highly detailed view of network parameters to the high-level key performance indicators of the business. WatchMark Prospect is a client-server architecture application that delivers performance metrics and makes it simple to generate performance reports for use across the enterprise.
One of WatchMark's key customers required more flexible access to their Prospect data and reports. To accomplish this, WatchMark asked Übermind to help recreate essential Prospect functionality in a web application. Übermind analysts and engineers needed to rapidly assimilate the business processes modeled in WatchMark Prospect, and then migrate the application's functionality to the web.
Solution
Übermind met with WatchMark to define the scope of the project, determining the end-client's needs regarding functionality. It was decided to roll out functionality in a phased approach in order to assess sets of functionality as they became available. Requirements and project management information, as well as bugs, were managed via collaborative web-based systems, enabling Übermind's staff to work efficiently both on and off-site as required by the client.
It was quickly determined that the customer maintained an undocumented, legacy middleware with proprietary protocols. For this reason, after high-level requirements were determined and use cases developed, the Übermind team had to reverse engineer the interfaces, creating a messaging architecture along the way. Übermind sped development by creating a data object modeling scheme that mapped the proprietary DB result set response from SQL queries performed over WatchMark's XML interface. This enabled engineers to manipulate data without the worry of writing and maintaining the corresponding SQL.
As WatchMark's needs demanded a flexible, low cost solution for delivering the product to their end customer, open source technologies were selected for deployment. These consisted primarily of the Sun Java2 Standard Edition implementation for the core libraries and J2EE with Jakarta Tomcat for serving the dynamic content. In addition JAXP with the Xerces implementation was leveraged for communications with the existing architecture and the Apache Web Server was selected for it's robust content serving abilities.
Previous to this project, Übermind had created a custom struts architecture, inspired by Sun's implementation, that was key to quickly developing the GUI and managing the dynamic behavior that integrates with the J2EE technology. By leveraging previously developed technologies, Übermind was able to develop the infrastructure in parallel with the GUI for the web application and the team was able to give WatchMark an early proof-of-concept demonstration and timely progress updates while mitigating technical risks.
Results
- Extension of product offerings
- Quick time to market