Adobe's ColdFusion Web application server is proving invaluable in the ongoing program management of GautengOnline (GOL) by Ernst & Young.
GOL is an ambitious project by the Gauteng Department of Education aimed at the creation of a province-wide schools computer network and the development of ICT skills among learners.
According to Grant Brewer, business advisory partner at Ernst & Young, the GOL program managers, using ColdFusion MX 7, supplied by e-business enablement specialist and Adobe distributor, Dax Data, has enabled the program office to build sophisticated applications quickly and at a low cost.
"Given the magnitude of the investment in the GautengOnline project, the ROI from the systems supporting the initiative was critical. The use of ColdFusion has delivered significant ROI. The running cost per week is several million rand, and any delay owing to longer application develop time would have had a severe impact on the project costs. The Web applications were delivered in a third of the time that we felt it would have taken using conventional Web development technologies. This kept the project from overrunning the budgets. The range of value-added services such as a free text search engine, integrated reporting, mail engine and charting also enhanced ColdFusion's overall value proposition.
"A major element of the project is the collation and management of information about the participating schools, including contact numbers, the names of the educators involved and the compilation of an asset register. We also monitor data on security, recording incidents of theft and break-ins and then produce reports and analysis based on the data. This enables administrators to remain up to date at all times on the project's status and progress," he says.
"We deployed SQL Server to handle the storage requirements and, by using ColdFusion, we were able to build the necessary applications for the platform quickly, progressing from the drawing board to the first release in six to eight weeks."
Adds Dax Data managing director, Jeremy Matthews: "ColdFusion's integrated report writer with its drag-and-drop capability now allows rapid and easy creation of sophisticated reports, while the Flash-based forms enables the creation of an attractive interface, requiring no Flash coding knowledge, that is both professional and easy to use."
"ColdFusion's simplicity from a coding point of view," says Brewer, "has enabled Ernst & Young to shrink the project's requirement phase, building basic applications and taking them to prototype quickly, which speeds up the overall development cycle.
"The platform allows us to follow a data-centric approach which means that project managers can grasp the solution quickly, freeing them up to focus on strategic thinking as opposed to mundane data extraction and management."
Adds Matthews: "The ColdFusion application server is underpinned by J2EE technology, ensuring future scalability of the solution as required. Developers can easily design and generate high-quality, structured business reports which are populated dynamically in the context of Web applications.
"ColdFusion MX7 can render clean, crisp charts and graphs with over 200 different modifiable attributes to control animation, colours and labels, which can easily be added to dynamic business reports."
Other advantages include the ability to create rich Flash forms and XForms in minutes using just a few ColdFusion tags and transform Web content into high-quality printable, portable documents in PDF or FlashPaper 2 formats using a single tag.
Brewer says Ernst & Young evaluated a number of other potential solutions for the network platform, but ColdFusion's ease of use, flexibility, speed of development and the availability of a strong user group combined to make it a simple choice.
"The solution is currently up and running and is under continual development as our requirements mature. So far, ColdFusion has proved to be an extremely stable and robust solution and, importantly, we were able to seamlessly upgrade to Version 7 when it became available," he concludes.
Share