SHOWCASE

Maggioli's technological evolution path

CLIENT

Maggioli SpA is one of the largest Italian companies that provide products and services for PAL, with a particular focus on production and assistance for governmental management software.
“A history of experience and innovation in the service of local government and professionals” says a slogan on the company website, whose key market is public administration and the professionals that are work in this environment, to which it provides services and products in the following areas:

• Management Control
• Finance and Personnel
• Demographic Services
• Local police
• e-government
• Protocol and Secretariat
• Taxes
• Territory
• Social Services
• Legal

As well as this production activity, the area of custom made projects and system integration is also growing.

CONTEXT

The company’s products have followed the constant evolution of their clients in terms of management and functional needs. The solution the company develops are traditionally divided into:

• resident applications (in both client-server and stand-alone mode)
• web-based applications (accessible through web server distribution).

REQUIREMENTS

Maggioli immediately perceived the need to build more usable, interactive and rapid distributed applications (both resident and web-based), which would be in line and often anticipate the general evolution of the user base and the market in terms of user experience. Therefore the challenge the company wanted to address was the radical and innovative interpretation of user logic.

It was clear for the company that the user experience focus was becoming a central concept and a priority even for service applications in business contexts, a concept that will therefore have to inspire the next evolution of portfolio products and projects under construction.

Therefore Maggioli understood the need to start exploring the realm of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The company tendency to import skills also means it had to be very cautious because any choice would have important and long lasting repercussions.

Maggioli asked Comtaste to support it for this project.

SOLUTIONS

Comtaste followed the various phases of the project.
We started with an information session, where we supported the company by answering all their questions and clarifying their doubts regarding the technologies, limits, pros and cons of every possible option. We chose a technology through a needs analysis process, followed by a feasibility study.
In particular, we tried to find a common technology for all their applications, which could be scalable and editable with competitive costs and timing, which led us to choose Flex.

Once we’d found the best option in terms of technology, architecture and development process, Maggioli and Comtaste designed a customized training program for the internal resources of the company.
The program was structured according to the following modules, divided by role and category of developers:

• an “institutional” module on Flex and RIA project logics. The first module included Flex Builder 3 environment, ActionScript 3 as a programming language and Flex 3 SDKs. The developers learned how to use ActionScript 3 through theory and practical examples, to implement, extend and customize the Flex framework, in order to overcome the limits (as described in Requirements paragraph) that clients normally encounter with other technologies.
• a module on best practices, on the use of design patterns with ActionScript 3 and Flex SDK, as well as Cairngorm. This module was conceived to provide developers with best practices, techniques and approaches to program robust, secure and performing Flex and Actionscript 3 applications. Through the most common design patterns in the world J2EE (Java Enterprise) in ActionScript 3, we demonstrated how to apply these methodologies in the Flex 3 environment and how to increase productivity by team development, exploiting one of the open source micro architectures released by Adobe: Cairngrom.
• a module on Blaze DS and PureMVC. The last part of Comtaste’s training process for Maggioli addressed the illustration of another kind of architecture to develop RIAs with Flex, PureMVC, and with techniques to install, configure and connect Flex and AIR applications to BlazeDS in Java server logic. BlazeDS actually allowed Maggioli to connect its Flex applications to distributed J2EE architectures (Java Enterprise) very easily, to carry out real time data pushes exploiting the AMF format to transfer data in binary mode. This technique increased the application’s performance compared to XML or SOAP formats to exchange data from the server to the client.

Through a completely customized training process, tailor made for Maggioli’s requirements, which took into account the course delegates, Comtaste went hand in hand with the client in a gradual approach to the development of Enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3, BlazeDS and ActionScript 3.