News 2004

November / December
Management We assumed short term project management responsibilities for a expansive and critical implementation project in the industrial sector.
Management As members of the project management and quality assurance teams, we took part in an remarkably large IT outsourcing tender. It's targets were the reduction of the unit costs as well as the improvement of service quality.
Coaching We provided J2EE architecture consulting for a large technology customer. We accepted the role of coaching up to 50 developers in topics such as Java and test-driven development. One of our experts developed a new SQL-Dialect to integrate a customer's special-purpose database with an object/relational mapper. The alpha version, which was developed over the course of a weekend, achieved 97.5% successful unit-test execution.
Processes We took stock of a corporate departments's existing business processes and advised them on their modernisation in preparation for an intranet relaunch. The reviewed results were documented on the intranet.
Software engineering We started on the development of a complex web application, which brings together the functionality of several existing web applications. This involved the migrating incongruent data out of multiple production databases and into new databases.
Administration We accepted further responsibilities with one of our major customers for the operations, planning and maintenance of a complex software stack and of a intricate management software.
Community As a "Thank You" to the Open Source-Community and as a celebration of the successful business year, TNG supported several Open Source projects that were helpful in our work. The supported organisations included the Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation Europe, Mozilla and Source Forge.

September / October
Migration We redesigned a large, maintenance-intensive Apache/Tomcat production environment. The new environment that we chose utilizes multi-layer, load-distributing and highly available architecture, which makes it possible to cluster Web and Java application servers into pairs. A test environment that mirrors the production system was also built. After installation and configuration of the new setup, several existing J2EE web applications were migrated. Important aspects such as maintainability, updateability, simplicity of deployment and monitoring were all provided for. A Tomcat management tool was adapted for the clustered environment. Regression tests and flawless rollout were seen through.
EAI We implemented a complaints management system based on an EAI/workflow platform developed in-house.
J2EE We developed several user-friendly web-clients with modern component-based frameworks. A significant part of the development was the programming of reusable GIS components. Old applications were migrated from Visual Basic to J2EE.
Migration We assisted in a difficult upgrade of a combined Oracle/Solaris environment. This included planning and coordination of the large test systems, including the related backups, restores and downtimes.
Administration For a new customer we accepted responsibility for consulting, planning and realization of tasks in the areas of Linux/Windows- and ERP system administration. This included answering queries about Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

July / August
Oracle | PL/SQL Our GIS developers extend and improve a location based services application based upon PL/SQL. Among other things, they implemented a new algorithm for Oracle 9i Spatial which gives users information about their position and the accuracy of that position estimate. In the subsequent component test of the application, it was certified as having 'zero bugs'.
Management We enlarged our Unix-team and were entrusted with the additional responsibility of supervising outsourcing companies.
Oracle | Migration We migrated a text based database of administrative data into an Oracle database and wrote a web administration guide in Perl. Thanks to synchronisation with an LDAP-directory and additional heuristic error correction methods the data quality increased significantly.
Testing We took on a new assignment dealing with component tests of a very complex stack of business software.
Management We accepted several management consulting tasks in an international storage consulting project, including the central project offices and responsibility for a subproject.

May / June
Software engineering Working with our customer, we reimplemented the core of a complex business application, which originally took over 1000 consultant-days of work. Thanks to the capable team, which had a very good overview of the Unix tool landscape, this was done within about 100 man days. Discrepancies between the old and new versions occured during the head-to-head comparison; The following analysis revealed not only that the new prototype still had bugs, but also that there were bugs in the business software that had gone unrecognized for years.
Consulting One of our experts advised a large multinational corporation on the introduction of several service management processes from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
Java One of our Java-teams developed not only a new application framework within 6 weeks, but also a new business application based on this framework. The application was accepted by the client's management to be rolled-out to 800 employees.
J2EE | JBoss During the Integration of JBoss 3.2.3 and WebLogic 8.1 within a production environment, we discovered that transaction propagation between the two J2EE servers wasn't functioning. After an extensive debugging session, we wrote a new implementation of XAResource. It can take part in a WebLogic distributed transaction, while directing JBoss via a UserTransaction. 2-phase commit was supported.
Prototype One of our experts wrote a technology demonstrator based on a modern component-oriented web framework.
LaTeX We developed a set of LaTeX templates which are used for the automatic generation of business documents.

March / April
Migration During the migration of about 15 terabytes of data between NAS filers, one of our experts devised a method to optimize storage usage by 2 terabytes. However, this method stressed the filers so much that two bugs in the filer operating system were found. After developing workarounds for the bugs, the data migration was completed on time. The unexpected saving of 2 terabytes represented a significant cost advantage for the customer.
Network We designed a complex network and system topology with multiple DMZs and Linux-based firewalls. The system is based on Debian stable with a 2.6-kernel.
GIS We accepted a new assignment in the field of Geographical Information Systems. During a warm-up phase, one of our specialist discovered that the existing application was not multithread-safe. A new, thread-safe version was developed and deployed.
Migration We migrated old, but important legacy systems from Solaris to Red Hat Linux. WebDAV under Apache 2 is used to authenticate the users.
Architecture We designed a modern Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) for a large corporation with more than 500 business locations in Germany alone. It provides basic business services and workflows spanning multiple systems, even multiple outsourcers.
Architecture We conducted an architecture review for a high-load EJB application.
Consulting For a large customer that wanted to procure a custom-developed software system, we proposed a cheap alternative based upon features built-into the software stack that the customer already owns. The demonstrated savings for the customer amount to a quarter million Euros.
TNG In order to cope with the growing size of the company, we moved our offices to a new, significantly larger facility. Our new address is Betastrasse 13a, also in 85774 Unterföhring.

January / February
Testing We conducted a full code review of an important J2EE web application for a large client; the application would usually to lock up under load, even on large hardware. A complex runtime environment (LDAP, Oracle, WebSphere) needed to be replicated to test the large amount of code. Detailed profiling of all data base queries proved to be useless. Nevertheless, finally we found the reason for the lockup and propose an effective solution. An advantageous side effect of this step was the acceleration of the execution time for the affected web page by a factor of ten.
One of our consulting teams flew to the United States-Teams in order to work on-site with the IT department affected by a multinational project.
Talk In a meeting of the Munich Java User Group, one of our experts gave a sophisticated presentation about the best practices currently employed in the Java sector. We presented everything from programming tips for tools to development models.
Consulting We developed a catalogue of standard procedures for certain IT processes for a large corporation. These standards will be used in the future by the IT and operating departments.
Perl It doesn't always have to be Java: For storage management, we developed a nifty web application in Perl.
J2EE The J2EE-eBroker-application which we helped to design and implement in 2002 continues to be up and running practically fautlessly online. The volume has grown to about 190.000 users per day.