Reusable Architectural Framework used by multiple Energy Trading Applications

A large initiative to provide common application infrastructure across the board for the multitude of applications running inside British Petroleum.

Handling displays of huge amounts of data, persisting objects, capturing complex user interactions.

The challenge

• With a company the size of British Petroleum, new applications were springing up on a monthly basis - with each application providing its own mechanism for security, logging, data access etc. A need for a cohesive standard framework was apparent.
• The largest application to run on the common framework would be - to put it mildly - LARGE. With several gigabytes of data - several data feeds, several screens displaying grid-upon-grid of data and an end-to-end energy trading mechanism (from deal capture to settlement).
• Several thousands of records (several MBs) of data would need to be displayed using advanced data grids providing real-time updates, insertions and deletions.

The Solution

Using the .NET framework and several open source components built around the framework (including spring.net, nHibernate, log4net...), I helped design and implement a solution which included:

• A reusable UI framework consisting of CAB, SCSF and advanced Syncfusion UI controls.
• A pluggable architecture using spring.net, object persistence using nHibernate, common logging using log4net, automated builds using CruiseControl.
• Comprehensive unit tests written for both the business layer as well as the UI layer. Fully automated build process - encompassing entire framework with all its components.

The Result

Highly Scalable, Internationalized Web Application - Dell Battery Replacement

Requiring a quick turnaround (3 months) and a HIGHLY scalable website (in 8 different languages), I helped DELL build a scalable, multi-lingual (internationalized) website to speed up the returns process.

The Challenge

• Already Shipped Products: With affected batteries were already in use all over the globe - in over 40 countries - in every major continent  (Australia, Asia, Europe, South America, North America). The web application would have to support various languages as well as the different locales within a language (e.g. Canadian French, 'French' French, Taiwanese Chinese,Traditional Chinese).
• Millions of items to recall: There were over a million affected laptop batteries  - the serial numbers of which would need to be verified across disparate databases.  An elegant solution requiring minimal database hits would be needed for handling the anticipated website traffic.
• Laptops were in non-english speaking countries: The number of languages and locales to be supported could grow at any time. The solution needed to be flexible to support new languages - which may be discovered after deployment as well.

The Solution

Using the .NET runtime's globalization support, the first step was to isolate all resource strings, images and other UI elements that would be presented in the user's browser. These isolated 'language-specific' resources were compiled into individual satellite assemblies which were automatically loaded based on the language and locale detected in the user's browser. High performance, scalability and resilience were all key requirements - since the website was to receive hits from around the globe - (several hundred thousand hits per day). I helped design and implement a solution which included:

• Application caching of large datasets - Serial numbers that were part of static lookups were loaded once into memory and kept there - to avoid unnecessary database roundtrips.
• Server Farms - along with database based session management - to accommodate persistent sessions between different servers on the server farm.
• Highly optimized web controls from Infragistics - offering sophisticated dynamic web controls for a better end-user experience.
• Dynamic loading of individual language resources based on the user's chosen language and locale - with the flexibility to add more languages down the road.
• Comprehensive unit tests written for each critical use case - fromverifying battery serial numbers to order placement.  Fully automated build process - encompassing entire web application including multiple language support - providing a perpetual ready-to-release option for the web application.

The Result 

• An extremely successful production launch - which handled upto 100,000 hits hourly and upto 2000 simultaneous user sessions. 
• An end-to-end user experience which was unmatched in both - user-friendliness as well as speed.
• A solution which allowed additional languages to be added after the production launch - without any code changes! This helped DELL service other countries where they later discovered they had shipments of affected laptops (e.g. Brazil, Portugal).
• An extremely successful returns program that served over a million affected laptop customers around the globe.

• Contact Anuj for more details.

Migration from Classic ASP to ASP.NET - Large Social Networking Website

A start-up faced with the 'good' type problem - an ever growing user base - called on Anuj to address their performance issues.

The Challenge

• Bottlenecks in current ASP code and SQLServer database had brought the production site to a crawl.
• The existing production code was extremely hard to maintain due to a mix of display elements and business logic in single ASP pages.
• The existing production database was hard to maintain as it had never been correctly monitored since its default setup.

The Solution

• 1) It was evident that significant cleanup was required at both the database level as well as the application code level.
• 2) Starting with the SQLServer database, various bottlenecks were identified. These included - poorly designed queries, missing or incorrect indices, excessive memory usage and excessive disk usage causing high CPU Utilization.
• 3) Transaction logs sizes were shrunk to manageable sizes, Each query was re-written, several new indices encompassing multiple columns were created. A maintenance plan encompassing re-building of fragmented indices, backing up and shrinking of large transaction logs was implemented.
• 4) Code Cleanup - A lot of database access code was duplicated in various ASP files. These were all separated into a common data access layer - using efficient ADO.NET datasets and datatables.
• 5) Common UI elements were identified and custom user controls were created. These common controls were then used across various web pages - allowing a significant performance improvement in page-load times.

The Result

• Moved Varsity Media Group from a relatively slow performing community website to among the top 10 percentile (of all websites) – by identifying and cleaning up software related bottlenecks.
• Provided a faster and cleaner web navigation experience for end users.
• Increased monthly user subscriptions due to improved website performance.
• Accomplished migration from ASP to ASP.NET without bringing down the production site.

More details...

• Contact Anuj for more details.