From Garage-Band to World Tour: Technical, Security, and Scalability Challenges of a Web-Based Program Management Tool from Workgroup-Level to Enterprise-Class in 24 Months

摘要

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has a web-based application used for program management which provides its scientists and engineers a clearer, more rapid picture of their contractual and in-house R&D efforts financial and technical status, by allowing the contractor to enter information directly into the tool. This web application, called Jiffy, began as a tool developed by two engineers in AFRL's Information Directorate (IF) using ASP pages talking to a Microsoft Access database and was initially used by a handful of people. Senior management saw Jiffy as a tool that would benefit all of IF's engineers and scientists (approximately 450 people). Jiffy became recognized by AFRL as a best-practice and an effort was started to scale Jiffy up for use by all Air Force Research Laboratory engineers (approximately 3000 users). In this paper, the authors will describe the issues and solutions in migrating the application from an Access database to an Oracle database (and the technical architecture used), how the security of the application was improved, and how the application performance was enhanced to allow the application to scale up from a handful of users to thousands of users.