Once upon a time, a customer said we don't need no GUI. There is nothing wrong with our telnet (green screen) interface on our Public Warehouse Software you wrote in 1984. All of the enhancements you have made of last 15 plus years have kept the software meaningful. The software has all of business logic that truly reflects what we do. There is no need for any changes just keep supporting this for many more years to come.
In order to get a copy of your inventory from this customer you call them up and say I want an inventory. They print it off on the green bar paper. They take it over to the copy machine and shrink to 8 1/2 by 11. They then go over to the fax machine and fax it to you. Nevertheless, they would like to automate this task.
You are shipping in product to this warehouse and would like to get a confirmation back. When, the product arrives and is put away in the warehouse, the receiving document is copied, in order to get the driver's signature, and faxed to you. Nevertheless, they would like to automate this task.
You now ask them to ship your product. You have to fax them an order. They data entry the order. The pick sheet is faxed to the back of the warehouse, where they pull the product. The driver arrives and the product is loaded on the truck. They fax back a copy of the bill of lading and the pick sheet to their customer. Nevertheless, they would like to automate this task.
Over the winter of 2000, this software suddenly is transformed in to a 100% web application. The customers can log in and get their own inventory. Using Unidata's RedBack middle-ware this application is driven by IIS on a Microsoft server running Window NT using ASP pages.
You announce to this customer that the green screen is dead, long live Web GUI. They scream at you and say this web thing is a flash in the pan. They say you have spent a lot time do nothing for us. They say what were you thinking? They say no you were not thinking about us, only about getting more money from us.
You stand your ground and they prosper. You get a lot more headaches because you have four pieces to debug when things go wrong rather than one as before. And things do go wrong. RedBack won't stay up longer than a day or two. Transactions somehow get their wires crossed and end up on the wrong workstation. IIS need to be restarted as well do to memory problems and it gets slower and slower.
The customer reminds you that the telnet interface did not have this many problems. However, the customer no longer has to fax reports, their customers can print themselves. New enhancements are flooding in due the fact information is now at the finger tips of your customer.
Four year later you drop RedBack, IIS and ASP. Your replacement is an homegrown package called U2WebLink™ that runs on Apache Tomcat using JSP, HTML and JavaScript. The database is still Unidata but the middleware is written all in Java using UniObjects for Java. You and your team write these Eclipse based tools to build web pages and an object editor for the middle-ware. Since you have all of this free time you develop and UniBasic Editor, Dictionary Editor, a Universe and Unidata Resizer tool, and Software installer.
Thus ends the simple tale of one customer experience moving from green screen to Web. By the way they cannot imagine where their business would be had the not "decided" to move to the Web.
