Courts administrative efforts – made simple and evolved as product

For more than 20 years, a US-based provider of case management and judicial solutions. Their product line, which is used in more than 40 US courts, complies with the administrative procedures employed by US courts. It promotes accuracy and efficiency while minimising paperwork and duplication.

• In a relatively short period of time, they transitioned their client-server case management software to a web-based application.
• They sought to update the VC++-developed existing programme by creating a productive thin client product version to satisfy their customers' needs.

We compared all top open source tools for the development process, including PHP, Java, and Ruby on Rails (RoR), and we advised using RoR for its development framework for online projects.

The move was completed in a short amount of time, RoR was also used by us to lower the product's maintenance bandwidth over the long term.

Tools & Technologies Used:

• Language: Ruby 1.8.6
• Framework: Rails 1.2.4
• IDE: RadRails IDE v0.7.1
• Web Servers: Webrick, Mongreal, Lighttpd

Key Highlights of Rail:

• Usage of Lighttpd web server allows for ease-of-use, lower CPU utilization and better performance.
• Ajax was used extensively towards enhancing usability and performance

Technical Advantages:

• Rails migrations are DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). With Rails, we specified each column definition exactly once.
• Rails migrations allowed data migration as well as schema migration
• Rails migrations allowed us to use model logic with data migration
• Rails migrations are database independent
• Rails migrations allowed direct SQL for unsupported extensions

Product Architecture:

The client-server case-management software, written in VC++, was migrated to a web based product in the Ruby language.

Following diagram represents the architecture of the migrated product:

The areas below are where RoR outperforms competing languages and technologies

• Development Speed
• Maintainability
• Cost (lowered number of resources needed)

In addition, RoR also offers better Web 2.0 support when compared to other technologies, As a result, users experience faster page response times.

RoR also comes with an automated test functionality that automatically generates test files which increase the overall testing coverage.

Key Benefits:

• Reduction in development time by 40%
• Web-based product released to the market faster

Lower maintenance costs