Here are some of our past and ongoing projects
Here are some of the projects we've worked on over the last ten years, either in our current form (Oasis Digital Solutions Inc.) or as our predecessor company. If you have a project need similar to our past work, please contact us; we have retained the rights to some of these systems, and even in the cases where we have not done so, we accumulated significant domain knowledge.
We created a system to act as a "control panel" to operate a complex audio/video live/recording system in a large auditorium. Under the hood, a backend system from Pacific Interactive controls the hardware, presented a SOAP interface. The user interface software we created wraps this with a customized touch-screen control system to allow users at various levels of proficiency (novice to expert) to operate the underlying system in a smooth, professional manner.
Technologies: Delphi, Lua, SOAP
This project produced two software modules: one for the Palm platform, and one for Windows. Other than the platform, the two modules were designed to offer a nearly identical feature set as possible, with a user experience appropriate for each platform. They were used by our customer (a research organization at a major St. Louis area university) to collect data as part of a large, long term study.
Technologies: C++, Delphi
(description coming soon)
Technologies: Delphi, Various libraries
(description coming soon)
Technologies: Delphi, Various libraries
This mobile / wireless system tracks, routes, manages, and bills the activities of our client's 2000+ field personnel in the underground utility locating industry. The end users connect through a variety of networks at widely varying speeds (Frame Relay, DSL VPN, Nextel and Verizon mobile phones, etc.), so the system uses a disconnect / synchronization based data model in which some user operations are available at all times, while others requires an active network connection. This system also processes incoming data feeds from dozens of our customer's vendors and customers, in highly varied formats.
Oasis Digital provides the design, implementation, deployment support, critical issue production support, and software maintenance of this system, while daily operations are performed by our client's staff.
Technologies: Delphi, MS SQL Server, RemObjects, Python
This is an end-to-end in-house inventory-and-much-more system for a remanufacturing firm. This firm's requirements are somewhat unusual in that their business operations are of "enterprise" complexity, but they are a small-to-midsize firm. Between that and their unusual niche (remanufacturing of complex intrumentation), their needs are not readily met by any off the shelf manufacturing system they could find. The system we created for them includes a rule-based sales quotation system for complex, configured products; order management; inventory management; rule-based bill of materials; scheduling; data collection; and much more.
Technologies: Delphi, MS SQL Server, many third party controls
A client of ours came to us with a request from one of their clients, to port their complex and feature-rich MySQL based application to Oracle. We performed a "pilot" conversion of a small portion of the application, documenting the various issues and restrictions encountered, to allow them to schedule and estimate the overall project scope, as well as move toward a design that miminized future cross-database porting effort.
Technologies: Delphi, Oracle, MySQL, ADO, misc. third party components
This system, developed for a client who sells it to election boards around the country, accommodates the storage of millions of registered voter data on a commodity Palm device, with search/lookup features to allow election workers to easily direct voters to the right polling place. Because of the unique constraints of the project (the very large number of records and of the Palm platform, this system uses data storage structures which keep the bulk of the data compressed at all times - the un- compressed data set will not fit on the Palm device. An accompanying desktop application allows the system administrators to prepare updated data for each election cycle as needed.
Technologies: C++, PalmOS API
Our customer develops and markets a vertical market application for tracking the purchase, storage, usage, etc. of chemicals, bioagents, radioisotopes, and other hazardous or controlled materials. An important aspect of assuring compliance is a program of regular inspections/audits of laboratories and storage facilities where these materials are stored, to verify that proper procedures are being followed. Oasis Digital developed an application for the Pocket PC / Windows CE platform (HP/Compaq Ipaq devices, etc.) and a "sync server" used to move data between the handheld devices and their existing product, to enable our customer's end users to load data on to their PDA about needed inspections and data points to gather, enter the results of performing the inspections, generate reports of the results, etc. The system supports both fully disconnected operation, and wireless connectivity.
Technologies: .NET Compact Framework
In a followup to the above project, we developed software for the PalmOS platform (Palm branded devices, HandSpring, Sony Clie, etc.) and a matching "conduit", with the same functionality as the Pocket PC solution described above.
Technologies: Pocket Studio, PalmOS API, TurboSync
A client asked for advice on how to handle data access in their application. Our approach handles... (more description coming soon)
Technologies: Delphi, MySQL, Oracle, DBExpress, DataSnap, ADO, MySQLDAC, etc.
Client: a very large direct mail retailer
Project: The client has a large, complex J2EE / EJB application, built over several years, using a variety of data access software approaches; primarily a mix of direct JDBC access with BMP EJB Entity Beans. In load testing, they found that while the system was under roughly constant load the number of database connections and delay in completing business operations would sporatically spike to high levels. They had applied various approaches and tools to track down the problem, without success, so they brought in Oasis Digital to help. We found that their code contained many almost-duplicate sections, for the management of JDBC connection, statements, result sets, etc. We found scattered example of incorrect, incomplete error and resource management. To address this, we showed the client's developers how to apply the principal "Don't Repeat Yourself" (called DRY) to centralizaze interaction with the JDBC classes in to one place in the application. This layer simplified the application code dramatically, and made it possible to ensure that resources would always be released correctly. With this change, the connection and load problems went away; we determined that they had been caused by "leaked" JDBC statement handles and result sets, which were not noticed by WebSphere or DB2. When these orphans objects accumulated sufficiently, they caused delays and connection "spikes" while they internally (and silently) timed out.
Business Result: A serious problem, which put the organization's order processing at risk during an upcoming busy season, was resolved within a few weeks.
Technologies: Java, J2EE, WebSphere, Clustering, DB2, Mercury LoadRunner
Our client builds and markets a combination of hardware and software which adds check imaging capability to a variety of widely used check sorting equipment. Using this system, their customers (small to medium-sized banks) offer digital check image storage access to bank customers without replacing or upgrading their existing core data processing systems. This enables these banks to compete effectively with the very large banks, by offering digital check image storage as many customers have come to expect.
Oasis Digital built the software used by bank staff to access and manage the storage of this data; the system implements hierarchical data storage management (recent data is held on-line on hard drivers, older data is present in offline storage). The software can transparently access check image data stored across multiple servers, allowing commodity PC-grade hardware to handle terabyte-plus online data storage, DVD-RW based offline storage, automated backup management, WAN access with automated offsite "second copy" backup, etc. Some installations of the product have (as of early in the deployment) many millions of check images stored.
This project used a "build-then-hand-over" model in which Oasis Digital developed the working system and supported deployment to initial sites, then our customer's staff took over for ongoing development/maintence and support.
From a technical perspective, this project provides a compelling example of the advantages of storage large data objects outside of a DBMS system; the database handles only the meta-data about the check (i.e. gigabytes of data) rather than the terabytes of actual check image data. Thus it incurs the only the modest complexity and cost associated with the smaller database size.
Technologies: Delphi, Interbase, PHP
This system uses a "push" model, in which many users run a client applications which remains connected to a server application, asyncronously receiving updated data feeds then displaying them on-screen in various user-friendly formats. Changed data is highlighted, and historical data is available. The incoming data for the system comes from a variety of external systems operated by our client and their vendors; considerable application integration work was necessary to accomodate the variety of data formats, transmission mechanisms, and semantic differences between the data feeds. We used compression and close attention to data formats, to ensure that the system can scale to ~1000 client machines per server machine. Many more clients-per-server would be possible if needed.
Technologies: Delphi, ASTA
In the late 1990s, we eveloped many web applications, for intranet and internet deployment. Notably, some of these projects shared a common framework infrastructure, thought which we offered rapid and flexible development.
Technologies: Java, J2EE, JSP, ASP, PHP, Perl, etc.
A client came approached Oasis Digital with a product concept for a hardware / software combination involving silicon accelerometers, high speed data collection and procesing, and other technology. Working with a hardware engineer, we designed and implemented software to gather data then perform a variety of proposed algorithms on that data. The resulting prototype was used to evaluate the technological approach, to demonstrate the feasibility for potential investors, and to demonstrate to a market-leading hardware/software product engineering firm. Using our services, our customer was able to acheive the needed results for their initial prototype, at a fraction of the cost of using a large design firm for that step.
Technologies: Delphi, Various analog interface hardware
In addition to teaching official open-enrollment ASTA training, we have provided in-house, customized training in the use of ASTA and related software to several clients.
Technologies: ASTA, Delphi
A client came to us with a system which implemented a number of complex business rules as part of a sales data calculation process. Their existing implementation accessed their database in a very granular way, running tens of thousands of queries, and taking hours to complete. We built a next- generation solution for this problem, which elevates the business rules from data access code in to application code, then applied rigorous test-driven design to ensure that it produced correct output. In addition to being demonstrably correct and testable, this new implementation ran in seconds instead of hours, even on large data volumes.
Technologies: ASTA, Delphi, Interbase
Oasis Digital staff has provided training classes on a range of topics and technologies to our clients; and has worked on much more extensively with Java technologies than is apparent from the projects above.