lesson is that the development team has to be very close to business. They have to know the business processes; the granularity comes from the processes.”

 

The importance of architecture

Not far into the effort, team members realized that they had underestimated the importance of architecture. A couple of staffers focused on data modeling to ensure that the data structures were consistent across the various components. But it soon became apparent that data modeling per se was insufficient, that the real effort needed to be on architectural design and management so that efforts weren’t duplicated and components weren’t too tangled in dependencies. To this day, every development effort goes through the architectural team, which acts as both a design resource and requirements enforcer. “They retain the big picture of the implementation,” Sharabu says.

Development itself is not about writing code but about developing business logic. The team uses the Computer Associates COOL:Gen development platform — a later incarnation of the IEF platform it started with — to specify the logic, also relying on it to generate the component code. The mainframe components are still output as Cobol code because Con-Way runs its DB2 databases and CICS applications on IBM mainframes for their high transactional performance. “The code generated by COOL:Gen is perfect,” Sharabu says, so there’s no requirement for extensive Cobol expertise. The “applications” at Con-Way are essentially wrappers of specific business logic that call up various components as needed, passing data from one component to another to accomplish a task such as looking up a customer’s orders for the past month and generating the related invoice.

In some cases, the components communicate with packaged applications that Con-Way decided to buy rather than to attempt replicating. For example, although Con-Way is primarily an IBM shop, it uses BEA Systems’ WebLogic server for some services.

 

Evolving services

In 1999, when three of the seven mainframe application development phases were complete, Con-Way realized that

customers wanted to access order and tracking information via the Internet, which was then just getting initial traction as a service-delivery platform. So Con-Way began creating components that acted as proxies between the Web’s graphical interface and the green-screen presentation of CICS. “All we had to do was expose our components to the Web,” Sharabu says. Written in COM and Visual Basic, these initial components were made available to customers to run on their computers, with the service distribution managed at Con-Way using Microsoft IIS.

Soon after, Con-Way switched to Java because the IT staff decided that client-side Java made the most sense, providing both a graphical UI and the zero deployment advantages of a thin client. “Most of the Java functionality was over UI and presentation, pulling together the business components,” Sharabu says. “We still have it the same way.” Customers typically have browser-based SSL connections to Con-Way’s systems, although a few integrate directly using SOAP and SSL. Data is typically presented through XML or as report files in popular formats such as Microsoft Word and Excel.

Con-Way dropped the IIS server in 2000 because Microsoft ASPs were “not cutting it” as usage increased, Sharabu says. Instead, the company deployed an IBM WebSphere server and began using EJBs to encapsulate the business and presentation logic for Web-based services.

In 2003, Con-Way extended its architecture to work with a data warehouse that replicated data from its parent company’s Oracle system. It deployed a Tibco EAI server to connect its mainframe applications to CNF’s Oracle Financials and PeopleSoft applications so that the two companies’ systems could interact. (Before that, Con-Way and CNF just exchanged data.) The initial interface components were hard-coded; Con-Way is now creating components that deal with the applications’ APIs, so as the applications change, the components don’t have to.

The company has also expanded the use of data warehouses and data marts, as customers demand more information in near real time. To support that, Con-Way has created Web-based components that allow customers to run queries and reports against these data marts. Con-Way is also exploring the use of an event-based architecture on