The Client
Compass group is the leading provider of contract catering and support services in the UK and Ireland.
Part of Compass Group PLC, a world leading foodservice and support services organisation, with annual revenues of around £14.5 billion (in the year to 30 September 2010) and operations in 55 countries world wide.
Solving Problems
Entropy IT began the task of converting the in unit system, Nexus, for the largest catering company in the UK.
Nexus, a large client server application, is deployed at over 3500
sites throughout the UK. It was originally developed in Visual
Basic 6, VB6, and SQL Server 2000 using a multi-component, tiered
architecture, and disconnected XML recordsets.
The task of converting Nexus to a C# .NET 2005 Windows Forms
application involved a major redesign of the core components and
its user interfaces; alongside changes to the SQL Server Stored
Procedures and Functions.
Due to the scale of the application it was essential to the
Compass Group that the legacy, VB6, components could be used,
interoped, to allow for a phased release schedule.
All new forms were kept consistent using one of the major features
of the .NET framework, visual inheritance.
Object Orientated design techniques were used to improve the code
reusability and quality.
Outcomes
Effortless deployment and a solid framework for all future enhancements.
The system rewrite for the Compass Group gives the following benifits:
- Faster development (less to do, the system handles more)
- Lots of built-in functionality through a rich object model
- A variety of ways to interface and integrate with the outside world
- More reuse
- Easy to integrate different languages into one system
- Easier deployment
- Scalability
- Easy to build sophisticated development tools
- Interfaces well to existing software
