Appeon Moves Pharmaceutical Enterprise to the Web

About Jewim Pharma

Jewim Pharma is a major producer of pharmaceutical products for both the domestic Chinese market as well as overseas markets. Jewim is headquartered in Beijing and has branch offices in 29 provinces and cities in Mainland China.

Since its founding, Jewim Pharma has grown at a phenomenal rate - over 45% annually in recent years. To sustain this growth rate, Jewim is constantly seeking to increase the maintainability, scalability, and flexibility of the IT systems that run its business.

Can We Get to the Web without Discarding Past Investment?

To improve costs and efficiency, Jewim has since its inception realized the value of highly efficient IT systems in supporting its operations. Since 1994, Jewim had been building up systems based on client-server architecture for business functions such as finance, office management, and management of its chain of retail stores using Sybase's PowerBuilder tool.

As the scope of Jewim's IT systems expanded with its business, the deficiencies of the client-server architecture became increasingly obvious. "For example," says Xue Feng, CIO of Jewim Pharma, "Operating the system from external locations was difficult, data updated slowly, and adding new features created serious maintenance headaches. Each time any one of our systems was updated, we had to deploy new client software to every end user." With the rise of the Internet, moving to a unified Web-based platform became a critical item on Jewim's IT agenda. But doing so would force Jewim to make difficult decisions.

The problem Jewim faced was that it had already made enormous investments in its legacy client-server systems and, despite their problems, the systems were stable and complete. It would be hugely wasteful to throw them away and start work on a new Web-based system from scratch. In addition, Mr. Xue and Jewim's IT staff were concerned about the many widely recognized limitations of Web, such as the limited user interface, the high cost of development, etc. Ideally Jewim would be able to turn all of its client-server applications into standard Web applications automatically.

The Solution: Appeon for PowerBuilder

Xue Feng "Had consistently been looking for a way to reduce the cost of moving from client-server to the Web". Then, in June 2003, he happened upon Appeon for PowerBuilder. "I discovered this product that could take a PowerBuilder app and automatically convert it to a Web app with identical UI, meaning that we don't need to retrain end users for the new system."

Appeon for PowerBuilder (APB) is the only product that can automatically migrate a traditional PowerBuilder client-server architecture application to the Web. Based on the original client-server application source code, APB automatically creates an n-tier Web application. The migrated application precisely replicates the rich user interface of the original application, including powerful DataWindow functionality, a multi-window interface, and advanced printing capabilities. The migrated application possesses the scalability, security, reliability, flexibility, and other benefits of an n-tier network architecture. Because the entire process is automatic, there is no need to spend time understanding the application business logic, which greatly cuts down migration effort.

Technical Architecture

The Appeon for PowerBuilder architecture has following characteristics:

• A single PowerBuilder code base deploys to both client-server and Web architectures.
• The deployed Web applications are based on highly scalable Java and Web standards-based n-tier architecture:
  (1) The client-side presentation layer uses only pure HTML, XML, and JavaScript. The applications do not require browser plug-ins, ActiveX, Java applets, or other downloads to the client machine.
  (2)Server-side presentation and business logic is contained within the Sybase EAServer Java Application Server.
  (3) Application data is stored in the existing database and accessed through JDBC
• Applications use only standard HTTP over port 80, making them interoperable with existing firewall and security infrastructure without special configuration.
• The report printing functionality of the original client-server application is preserved using the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) printing capabilities of Appeon for PowerBuilder, avoiding the hassles that usually come along with printing on the Web.

Implementation Results

Using the Appeon for PowerBuilder solution, Jewim Pharma realized a highly cost effective, highly productive system:

For Now and for the Future

The new system has greatly simplified life for Jewim's IT staff - they no longer need to expend great effort deploying application updates to end users, and did not need to deal with the hassles of implementing and testing a completely new system. End users are happy as well - they now need only enter a URL in a browser and can access the application from anywhere in the world. And of course, Jewim's decision makers are greatly pleased by the money they saved on development and training costs for the new system.

But what Mr. Xue and others at Jewim appreciated most about the Appeon solution was that it not only future-proofed their existing PowerBuilder investments but also gave the company a tool for developing new Web applications that was more productive than any they had encountered before. Developers now use the familiar PowerBuilder development environment to develop new applications in exactly the same way as before, then deploy to the Web with one click of the Appeon "Deploy" button. According to Mr. Xue, "Appeon not only gave us the lowest-risk, lowest-cost path to the Web, it also gave us the most productive way to develop new Web applications going forward, and using our developers' existing skills."