Logan Bus Company |
Bus Stop Portal |
"Quite honestly, if Iron Speed Designer was not an option, this
project probably would not have even started because the time
frame to finish it was too tight..."
- Akesh Gupta, Co-founder of Light Speed Solutions
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Bus Stop Portal |
Logan Bus Company
Ozone Park, NY USA
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The Bus Stop Portal application was built for the Logan Bus Company of New York City.
Its primary purpose is to provide a Web site where parents can find the pick-up and
drop-off times for their children's school buses. Additionally, the application
tracks all relevant information about schools, buses, drivers and students in one
centralized database.
In order to provide better service to the community, the New York City Department of
Education wanted parents to know the estimated pick-up and drop-off times for their
children and mandated that school bus companies in New York City maintain a Web portal
with this information. If the buses are late for some reason, the Web site must reflect
that delay.
To further complicate matters, the Department of Education makes changes to routes and
student stops on a daily basis. For security reasons, downloading the raw data was not
an option. The only available option was to build a secure Web portal where parents could
log in and view the bus routes, stops and student information. The Logan Bus Company investigated
alternatives, but because of the specialized nature, there were no off-the-shelf packages available.
Over time, the Bus Stop Portal application has been expanded to:
| Track student information |
| Track bus information |
| Track bus driver information |
| Maintain up-to-date route information provided by Department of Education |
| Communicate and track all communications, complaints and issues as they arise
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Application size and scope |
The application is comprised of one Microsoft SQL Server database with 15 tables,
four views, and 80 Web pages.
With the number of routes exceeding 1,000 and the average number of stops per
route exceeding 25, we needed to design the database so it could be easily expanded
to cover many bus companies. The final database handles nine different bus companies
with their individual routes and student stops. At present, the "stops" table has over
50,000 stops for all students, routes and bus companies.
The application is designed so that all nine bus companies use one database and
one application. A lot of information is generated in real time using the URL
information of the page requested. In addition, the images are updated dynamically
to reflect the unique design theme of each different bus company.
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The project |
The Department of Education (DOE) gave the Logan Bus Company a one month deadline to accomplish the project!
Our team of four spent the first few days defining the basic requirements and creating sample Web sites for
the DOE's review. After accepting the requirements:
| A Web developer began developing page templates and their Web site
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| A systems architect designed the database and created the Custom Upload Utility to automate the process of fetching data from the DOE's Web site
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| An application developer started the application development using Iron Speed Designer and Visual Studio .NET
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| A project manager coordinated the actions and made sure that as requirements changed, all team members were updated
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Because the application developer was using Iron Speed Designer, the basic page
layouts were completed in the first week even though there were many requirements
changes during that time.
We spent the second week adding custom code to automate the process of showing dynamic information.
We also programmed some back-end processing, including e-mail confirmations and resorting the routes
after receiving daily changes from the Department of Education.
After the second week, the application was more than 90% complete and the Logan Bus
Company was quite happy with the progress.
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Code extensions and customizations |
Since the application keeps track of all company communications with parents, students and drivers,
Logan Bus Company sends confirming e-mails to the appropriate parties. As the data changes every
day, the routes need to be updated in real time. For example, if the student from Stop #2 is not
going to be picked up after next week, the route and data must be changed to reflect the updated
times for all the stops after Stop #2.
For the most part, Iron Speed Designer had examples of code customizations that we could use to
finish this project. No third-party control was used in this application.
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Page layout customizations |
We designed an application-specific theme to match Logan Bus Company's Web site.
The parent-child page layout produced long Web pages because of the access to route
information, log information, event information, and contact information. To make
the pages shorter we integrated a tabbed page concept. This resulted in a web application
which looks very much like a Microsoft Windows application with tabbed sections for all
details.
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Metrics for success |
It was a tremendous help that Iron Speed Designer took care of most of the
repetitive tasks. Except the daily upload process, this application does
not have a lot of transactions during the day. The final production solution
resides at a GoDaddy.com-hosted website. The response time has been very well
accepted.
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Iron Speed Designer impact |
Quite honestly, if Iron Speed Designer were not an option, this
project probably would not have even started because the time
frame to finish it was too tight. Iron Speed Designer's best
feature was its awareness of database changes, which allowed
the changes to be incorporated into the application in a matter
of minutes. This allowed us to chase the "moving target" as the
Department of Education kept changing its requirements kept changing
their business process and requirements.
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Next steps |
The next phase of this project is to integrate with some mapping
services, like MapPoint, to automatically update the pick-up and drop-off
times in near real-time. A GPS device may be integrated to update
the database every time the bus "STOP" sign is opened by the driver to
pick up or drop off children.
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About the developer |
Master of Sciences — Northwestern University
MCSE+I, MCSD, MCDBA, MCT
Akesh Gupta is co-founder of ExecuTrain of Long Island and Light Speed
Solutions. He is passionate about technology and loves sharing his
knowledge with others. ExecuTrain of Long Island is a corporate
training company specializing in bringing real world knowledge to the
training room. Light Speed Solutions is a professional consulting and
software development company that focuses on turning business vision
into reality. Akesh Gupta has more than 14 years' experience in
designing and developing successful applications. Light
Speed Solutions has become a one-stop solutions center offering
advanced, diversified expertise in all facets of development, with
complementary expertise in systems, reporting and accounting.
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