The project that I liked the best involved Frontier 3.0 starting in 1993. That Macintosh project involved a global firm. My job was to envision, design, and implement administrative processes between Germany and the United States for the particular group in question. Here are the highlights:
1) Create a schedule script to connect via modem over a voice-line dialup using ARA Server between Germany and the U.S. This involved the scripts to detect the proper day of the week from a table and then monitor the connection for completeness. A log file was created for each step of the process and sent to the users informing them of the success of failure of each step as well as entire process.
2) Mount Novell Servers running AppleTalk in the U.S. office on the local desktop in Germany and check that mainframe text files have been deposited before attempting transfer. This involved a main script making calls to auxiliary scripts using parameters passed into table structures.
3) After successful data transfer, unmount the server, disconnect, and quit ARA Server. Start up a local application to strip out the extra characters the mainframe generated and that MIS could not remove ahead of time. This involved the writing of short scripts to control a character-stripper application. Rather simple because of Apple Events.
4) Connect to another Macintosh on the German network and call a Frontier script on that computer to start another application to read in the text file, parse it, and inserted the records into a Butler SQL database. When the process completed, quit the loader application and inform caller computer that the task had completed. Pretty simple because of AppleTalk and sending Apple Events across the network.
5) Local German computer then closes the log file and prints out the log for the user.
This workflow process allowed users in Germany to access their data locally without the hassles of dealing with the mainframe or MIS in the U.S. Because of the modular design of the scripts and table structures, any changes to the process were pretty simple. This process worked fairly well for almost five years and was recently replaced.
I could never have succeeded without Frontier because I had to do all the work alone without extra programming staff or a budget for a stand-alone client/server system. The bulk of the money on that project went to endless support and programming changes on the mainframe. But that is another story.
Sincerely,
Donald W. Larson, Technology Whisperer
Larson Consulting
Carlsbad, CA
Consulting and database-driven web site design services
mailto: dwlarson@sd.znet.com
Web site: http://sd.znet.com/~dwlarson/
Personal Web site: http://sd.znet.com/~dwlarson/DonL_home.html