.NET switch proves academic for MXL
Software developer MXL has been developing its eMinerva academic management system (www.eminerva.com) for nearly seven years. In that time, the system has found a strong following among Australia’s academic institutions, which need effective tools for managing their academic, financial, and other interactions with thousands of students.
Previously, eMinerva had been designed to run inside a school over a conventional local area network. Several years ago, however, it became clear that many institutions would benefit from a Web-based version in which MXL hosted customer data and bore the burden of keeping the applications running. The company initially developed an ASP (Active Server Page) based version of eMinerva, which was hosted from the Macquarie Corporate Telecommunications data centre.
Acceptance of that version proved the viability of the Web-based model. However, MXL realised its growth plans—which include aggressive international expansion (UK and Singapore agreements have already been struck)—required a more flexible, redundant, distributed architecture that would allow seamless distribution of eMinerva across many data centres around the world. Early last year, the decision was made to use Microsoft’s .NET framework as the foundation for a complete rewrite of eMinerva.
After mapping business processes to determine customers’ core requirements, MXL programmers began redeveloping the system from the ground up using C# and the .NET framework. Almost instantly, says Paul McNamara, MXL’s director of IT, they were hooked.
“We found that we got about four times the productivity using C# and .NET,” he explains. “Because .NET comes with Web-based components, we were able to deploy a lot of Web functionality at a much more rapid rate than with the traditional C++ environment. The technology guys were telling me that Microsoft seemed to have taken the best of other languages and put it into one.”
“We did look at doing it in Java, but because C# was closer to C++ the jump to C# seemed a lot less than the jump to Java. The whole process didn’t present any problems; there were always workarounds, and there were no major showstoppers along the way.”
Over a dozen schools along Australia’s eastern seaboard are already up and running with the new system after just a few months of operation. Performance tests show a 20 to 30 percent speed improvement over the ASP version, and the new system’s scalable structure should ensure that eMinerva maintains its performance as MXL targets some 1300 additional high schools and other institutions it’s already identified as potential users.
Because the .NET development environment maintains interÂÂrelationships between objects as they change, the new version of eMinerva will be easy to scale and adapt to customers’ changing needs. This includes, for example, a forthcoming move to increase redundancy by distributing the system across clusters of servers.
McNamara is anything but reserved in his praise for .NET. “It was a huge step forward into a very robust environment,” he says. “It’s very much easier to support, because the system can throw exceptions and report errors electronically. The turnaround on new releases and fixes is dramatically quicker, and we can bring on customers much faster. This is the first time in 25 years I’ve been in the industry that there has been some dramatic delivery from IT. There have been promises, but this technology actually delivers.”
Shouldn't you change 'Microsoft has changed' to 'Microsoft has to change'? A small but great difference, imho...