Global Car Hire Company
Scenario
Development of internet-based car hire application.
Situation
The client needed to produce advanced testing tools for an
Internet application. The project was split into two parts,
both revolving around the client's new Internet booking
application for booking rental cars via the Internet.
The first part was to create a test tool application,
to create car rental requests and submit the requests
to the booking application. The second part was to develop
a 'proof of concept' application, to allow the client's
sales and marketing team to demonstrate the new system
to potential customers.
Charteris Role
Charteris' associate company provided a senior
development consultant for all design and development
work. The Test Tool was developed using the Microsoft
DOM to load XML files, which were then modified by the
user. The completed XML requests were sent to an ASP page
on the client's website via an Internet Transfer Control;
the ASP page used a series of COM components to manipulate
the car rental database. The sending of an XML message
could also be 'recorded' and 'played back' later as a
batch of messages, for load testing purposes.
Most of the functionality was built into COM components written
in Visual Basic, so that the functionality could be shared
with the Tour Operator application. The latter, as part
of the holiday booking process, allowed the user to book
a car 'on-line' from the client. XML requests were created
by the application from data entered by the user, and
were sent to the clients's website via the same COM components
as were used by the Test Tool. XSL style sheets were used
to render the return data in an attractive and user-friendly
fashion.
Solution
The test tool allowed the client's development team quickly
to determine errors in the booking application server
interface, and to perform automated load testing of the
interface. The Tour Operator application was very successful
in showing potential customers how easily the XML interface
provided by our client could be used.
The software and technologies used were MS Visual Basic, XML
(MS XML DOM), XSL, Web-related controls (Internet Transfer
Control, Web Browser Control), MS Access 2000 & ADO
2.5, ASP.