Rapid Interconnection Development Between Legacy Software Using Client Side web Page Modification
Choompol Boonmee 1, Tawa Khampachua 2 and Romayong Surakitbunharn 3
1 Thammasat University, Klong Luang Pathumthani, Thailand 2 King Mongkut’ s Unversity of Technology, North Bangkok, Thailand
3 Ministry of Labour, Thailand
choompol. boonmee @ gmail. com twk @ kmutnb. ac. th romyong @ hotmail. com
Abstract: The software interconnection development is hard, expensive and time consumed since legacy software systems are heterogeneous and have very little interoperability. Thailand electronic government interoperability framework( TH e‐ GIF) is declared in national ICT master plan to facilitate electronic interconnection development of those heterogeneous software systems of public organizations. Presently mostly deployed software systems were developed using web page technology. In order to achieve the interconnection, those software systems need to be modified according to the TH e‐GIF specifications. Modifying legacy software systems is difficult due to many reasons; poor documentations, poor source code management and etc. To enable those systems to interoperate with other legacy systems requires expensive investment and a long period of time. Web page technology is basically a simple request‐response style communication between client side web browser and web server using http protocol. Client side software sends a request with required information to the server then receives the correspondence information back in html syntax with optional programming scripts. The communicated message can be filtered and modified on the fly at client side without modification of web server. In this paper we propose a technique of client side web page modification in software system interconnection development using standard data format. This method enables software systems interconnection development easier, faster and cheaper without modification of web server programs. In order to facilitate the electronic data interchange a standard electronic format has been developed and endorsed by Thai government under TH e‐GIF. However to force all Thai government body to modify those existing heterogeneous software is hard, expensive, and time consuming. Very few government bodies could realize benefits from the interconnections. In this research we performed two experiments of interconnection development using our proposed technique. The first experiment is the interconnection development of electronic correspondence management system( e‐CMS) software. The second experiment is the interconnection development of laboratory information system( LIM) software. Since there are only a few web pages have to be modified, the modification become less pain than expected. The interconnection developments in the experiments are as rapid as months and much less expensive than expected. This technique is independent from web based application development technology and tools; Dot Net, Java Server Page, PHP and etc. It can be applied to wide range of applications including ones developed by using obsolete software tools and supporting technologies.
Keywords: rapid development, client side web page modification, interoperability
1. Introduction
In e‐Government development, better public services require the seamless flow of information across government. The seamless flow of information across government agencies requires software systems interoperation. The interoperation cannot be easily realized since their information systems are different( Peng, 2005; Boonmee, 2008). Thailand electronic government interoperability framework( TH e‐GIF) was first announced in November 2006 in order to enable the electronic interconnection among Thai e‐ Government software systems( Thailand, 2006). TH e‐GIF includes a collection of guidelines, methodologies and technical standards. TH e‐GIF sets out technical policies standards and specifications as well as provides a guideline and procedure to build and manage national XML schemas. In order to obtain high interoperable XML schemas, TH e‐GIF also promotes the building of national core component dictionary and national XML schema standards. In 2006 the first national XML schema standard following TH e‐GIF was announced. It has been applied in systems interconnection development successfully( Saekow, 2008). There have been considerable attempts to apply such data standardization to various situations( Boonmee 2009; Boonmee 2010). Even the approach solves interoperability problems though the interconnection development still difficult and time consumed due to many reasons. This paper introduces a technique to develop the interconnection easier, faster and cheaper. In Thailand there are a number of government bodies; 20 ministries, about 200 ministerial departments and more than 6000 local government bodies. Normally they send and receive paper based documents to / from each other for communications, notifications, transactions and commanding systems( Saekow, 2008).
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