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Company Profile

Client is the world's leading transport operator with revenues of over £6 billion employing a staff of about 130,000 throughout the UK and North America and transports some 2.5 billion passengers a year.

Business Situation

Client needed to build two separate but related Rail Transport Applications. The first was a Customer Assistance Application to be used by train station and on-train Staff on their BlackBerry devices that allowed them to meet and exceed increased customer expectations related to travel information. The second was also a native BlackBerry application that assisted in the process of managing and tracking rail replacement buses that are used to provide alternative transportation when a timetabled train service is unable to run for any reason such as line closure.

Some of the challenges associated with the project were:

• The applications had to be extremely easy to use and responsive due to the dynamic environment in which they would be used by the staff.
• The applications had to be usable on a large variety of devices that were currently in use by the Client staff.
• The Applications had to be deployed and administered using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) across several hundred devices.
• Real-time integration was required with several existing data sources (such as NRE, NexusAlpha) for obtaining the latest information about bus and train movement.
• The BlackBerry Enterprise Server as well as the admin management backend had to be deployed and managed securely in a public Cloud environment.
  

Solution

Q3 realized the importance of building the application in a technology that helps the client to manage the application. To meet all client requirements, Q3 came up with a team of dedicated developers and proposed the N-Tier Java/J2EE architecture with Spring MVC, JSP/Servlets, Apache AXIS, WSDL, and Hibernate ORM Framework/JDBC. The whole application consists of four applications, which comprise of two blackberry application and two web based application. The application was delivered into three development phases. The first development phase was delivered with the Rail Replacement Application. The modified backend and database was delivered in the second development phase. The third development phase comprised Web application including admin and user module.

Each development phase was accompanied by QA cycle to deliver a better quality product. The changes suggested by client for each development phase were delivered in the next development phase delivered to client.

Architecture & Technologies

Architectural Component	Technology/Framework	Licensing
Language	Java 6/Java EE 5 BlackBerry JDE/Java, Micro Edition (Java ME)	Opensource
Target Deployment OS	Windows Server 2003	RackSpace Cloud Hosting
Server Software	BES for Applications v4.1.2 Apache 2.2 JBoss v6	Paid Opensource
Client Tier	HTML YUI, AJAX, JSON	Opensource
Presentation Tier	Spring MVC JSP/Servlets	Opensource
Application Tier	Spring Framework v3 (Dependency Injection, Transaction Management) Hibernate ORM Framework/JDBC Apache AXIS, WSDL JMS	Opensource
Batch Framework	Spring Quartz Job Scheduler	Opensource
Reporting	Jasper Reports	Opensource
Common Services	Apache log4j Spring/Acegi Security JAXB XML binding Lucene search engine	Opensource
Data Tier	MS SQL Server 2005 Database	Opensource
Tools	Eclipse Ganymede SVN Source Code Control JUnit Apache Ant Cruise Control (Build System)	Opensource