Euro Tunnel FoxPro Application
The decision to use a FoxPro-based solution for the Euro Tunnel was made because the overall system requirements could be met, an application could be developed at a reasonable cost, and the application could be delivered on time (there were very large financial penalties involved for late delivery). In fact, the time element was critical, since the decision to implement this system was made late in the game, and there wasn't a great of deal of time for development, interfacing, testing, implementation, and training. Requirements of the Euro Tunnel application included the ability to interface with several systems, log information collected by those systems, and then permit retrieval of that data. Some of the information was entered by operators, but the bulk of it was collected via automated equipment. The software was required to operate seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. The system also had to be secure and maintainable by an on-site administrator. Only half an hour per day was permitted for system maintenance, including backup. All the data collected had to be retrievable online in a real-time manner, and historical information had to be available from archive. The system had to be fault tolerant. If one component failed on either a workstation or the server, mechanisms had to exist to get the system quickly operational. The delivered system allows queries to 128GB of data in real time, performs backup and restore of all tables in real time, permits real-time hardware maintenance to individual tables, hard drives, computers or file servers, catalogs, stores, and retrieves information for more than 20 years worth of data, logs all data related errors, and permits real time data repair.
	The Joint Flow and Analysis System for Transportation
The Joint Flow and Analysis System for Transportation (JFAST) is a multi-modal transportation analysis model designed for the U.S. Transportation Command and the Joint Planning Community. JFAST is used to determine transportation requirements, perform course of action analysis, and project delivery profiles of troops and equipment by air, land, and sea. JFAST was first used in Desert Shield to analyze the airlift and sealift transportation requirements for deploying U.S. Forces to the Middle East and predict their arrival dates in-theater. These deployment estimates provided input for establishing concepts of operations and timing for military operations. During Desert Storm, JFAST was also used to track ships, provide delivery forecasts, and analyze what-if scenarios such as canal closings and maintenance delays. In addition to analyzing support for humanitarian efforts such as those in Rwanda and Somalia, and NATO operations such as those in Bosnia USTRANSCOM and the Joint Planning Community use JFAST to determine the transportation feasibility of U.S. National Defense Plans. JFAST is a part of USTRANSCOM's Global Transportation Network JFAST is a client-server application designed to run on one or more WindowsNT workstations--a JFAST simulation can run on a single workstation or be distributed over several peer workstations, and was developed using Microsoft's Visual FoxPro for application development; Visual C++ for ActiveX controls; and Microsoft C for performance-critical Dynamic Link Libraries (.DLLs). JFAST is the result of reengineering three independent models that previously existed for airlift, sealift, and land transportation into a common architecture. The graphical user interface makes significant use of maps, animations, and other graphic displays to aid the planner in understanding the output from the scheduling models. To assist in preparing briefings, JFAST makes extensive use of OLE automation and Microsoft Office. During the OLE session JFAST instructs the different tools in Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) to collect and prepare output data from the scheduling models into graphs, documents, and briefing slides--one mouse click produces a twenty slide briefing in approximately thirty seconds.
Surplus Direct
Surplus Software, established in 1992, sells refurbished computer hardware and previous-version software. Located in Oregon's beautiful Columbia Gorge, in the town of Hood River, Surplus Software isn't your average mail order business. Because of its remote location, the company relies on telecommunications and its print catalog as links to its customers. While Surplus Software does very well as a conventional mail order business, the recent move to the World Wide Web delivered a whole new customer opportunity. This was one of the first sites to use Visual FoxPro as a truly industrial strength Internet database Server. This site is written using Visual FoxPro and West Winds Web Connect product. Visual FoxPro is handling around 300,000 database hits/day! These are requests that are processed by Visual FoxPro, not just downloading of images. It uses Visual FoxPro running as an OLE Server.