XML middleware paves way for students registration
at Texas A&M
When it comes to servicing its students, Texas A&M University
aims to be at the head of the pack. Using a sophisticated array of
technology and the inherent strengths of the World Wide Web, the
university 's IT staff has developed a system that allows thousands of
students to simultaneously register for classes while drastically
reducing administration workload.
For years, students had registered for classes using an aging
telephone-based touchtone registration system, which communicated the
information to a student information system written in Adabas. But the
system, with only 120 ports for 44,000 students, led to maddening busy
signals and delays. Those frustrations, combined with a new generation
of Web-savvy students and a desire to relieve the burden on the
university 's administration and IT staff, prompted officials to find
a better way to conduct student registration.
The goals, said Dr. Timothy Chester, project manager or distributed
software applications in the university 's Computing and Information
Services division, were threefold: to develop a state-of-the-art
student registration system using the latest technology; to create
efficiencies in the system as a result of the ability to re-use
existing code; and to find a way to significantly decrease the number
of phone calls and e-mails to university administrators, making staff
more productive.
Chester says the process of determining the right set of tools took
a full three years." We spent a lot of time looking at what other
organizations do, and a lot of time looking at products and talking to
consultants," he recalled.. Chester 's team ultimately determined
that the tool should be based on eXtensible Markup Language
(XML),which would allow the team to develop and integrate disparate
systems regardless of the platform, language or application server
used." We have a very diverse campus, where some people like to
write in C on the Unix platform, some on Java, some in Visual Basic,
and some in Perl or Linux," he said.
Chester 's team also determined that it would be best to use
something it was comfortable with - in this case, another tool from
Software AG that would augment the university 's existing investment
in Adabas. The team ultimately settled on EntireX Broker, which would
act as a gateway, allowing developers to work with code from a variety
of sources, re-use existing code to speed development time, and reduce
errors - all in a Web-based framework. "
It 's basically a middleman," Chester described. "If I 'm
writing a Web application using Visual Basic, all I have to do is
generate an XML data stream and send it to EntireX Broker, which
decodes the information and translates it into the proper format or
the mainframe. Then the mainframe sends information back through
EntireX Broker, which puts it back in the format I need and hands it
back to me in XML."
To prove that the Web and EntireX provided the right combination of
technology, the team developed several pilot projects combining the
two. The first pilot involved erecting a simple Web page where
students could check the status of their admission applications - a
significant time-saver for a university dealing with about 25,000
applicants per year. A second pilot saw the development of a gateway
through which the university 's 30,000 to 35,000 yearly prospective
applicants could access information.
The tests were a runaway success. The Web page built to check the
status of admission applications resulted in a significant decrease in
phone calls and e-mails to university administration concerning
status, while the second pilot proved to be a much more efficient
method of providing information to prospective students. "
Before we put up this Web-based system, [students] either called or
sent e-mail and somebody here had to type it into a mainframe screen.
From there, it went into an Adabas file and each night, programs
processed and generated mailing labels," Chester explained."
Now they just fill out the information on the website and it goes
through EntireX Broker into the Adabas table. No one ever sees those
requests."
Because EntireX Broker allows developers to re-use pieces of code
from existing applications, development time also is much faster - so
fast, in fact, that the team has been able to reduce systems
development time by about 50 percent. "
The old way of doing things meant you had run utilities
periodically to extract the changes and then move them across the
different systems and load them up. Alternatively, you could code each
application to note that when a particular event happens, it must send
a message to all other systems so they can deal with it. Both methods
caused significant time delays, which isn't accepted in today 's
Web-centric world," he explained." This type of tool creates
a broker with a set of rules that explains what systems must be
notified when it receives specific messages."
For Texas A&M University, the next step is to develop
additional Web services that take advantage of the business objects
the team has created, such as adding classes to a student 's schedule
or selecting the entire student schedule to display on the screen.
"We'll be able to extend those through EntireX Broker as a
service, and the class registration Web system we 're building will be
built around that service," Chester said. Examples of additional
Web services might include a Web class system, which will allow
university administrators and dorm managers to access a student 's
schedule or a specific semester to ensure that they are registered for
the correct number of classes." That 's the kind of extensibility
we 're looking at," he said..
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