"Visual WebGui is the perfect tool for developing and deploying Web Enterprise applications...What impressed us immediately was the responsiveness of the solution compared to other products" --Enrico Pavesi, CTO

Overview
Nexus Informatica develops Mobile and Wireless solutions from 1997 and provides mobility solutions specializing in retail, barcode technology, Mobile solutions and Personal Shopping Systems.

WCube Logistic was created with the objective of streamlining the organization and control of all logistical activities of the warehouse through the use of radio terminals connected interactively to the system of departmental logistics. WCube Logistic solves the need of warehouse logistics and inventory management to be connected at any time by using mobile devices.

Business needs
Nexus Informatica looked to port its previous desktop logistics platform to web technology (old platform was Delphi based) The company needed to develop a logistics system that is Web based and can integrate with Mobile Devices for improved accessibility and mobility.

In addition, the updated web based system should remain fast and responsive even when accessed via mobile devices and at the same time provide the complete functionality of the previous desktop system and offer the required functionalities for warehouse management such as receiving goods, picking, in house inventory, etc.

It was also important that the system uses a web technology that can offer users easy installation process and upgradeability options and that the platform allows to leverage the teams existing .NET skills since there was no desire to spend time and resources on learning new languages and methodologies. That platform should also provide an easy web deployment process of the system.

The Solution
The team looked for a platform that would answer those requirements in their W3Logistic project which involved creating a Web Application with BL developed with ORM tool (LLBLGEn)

The team decided to evaluate Visual WebGui as the platform for this project. After running some internal tests Visual WebGui proved to hold the features and capabilities that Nexus Informatica was looking for. The team was impressed, in particular, with the productivity, good compatibility with web technology and easy porting of the familiar .NET experience that the Visual WebGui platform presents.

"Giving us visual WinForms programming experience for the Web, Visual WebGui was the answer to our requests. We have developed various solutions using .NET and we were able to reuse most of that code and provide a solution that looks and performs very similar to a desktop application," said Enrico Pavesi, CTO of Nexus Informatica.

Using Visual WebGui, the team has progressed significantly in only a couple of months despite using pre-release versions that showed constant reduction of problems with every new version. The visual development experience was intuitive and familiar as well as compatible with previous projects which meant that a lot of coding was unnecessary.

Benefits
Visual WebGui allows Nexus Informatica to port their logistics system to web technology while leveraging the development team's existing skills by providing a visual development experience that is intuitive and easy to understand for a WinForms programmer. Moreover, the person who initially evaluated Visual WebGui turned to developing the solution on his own. He found all the controls he was familiar to and was able to reuse a lot of business logic that was already created.

Visual WebGui includes a comprehensive choice of controls that is available right out-of-the-box and it also presents extensibility to other controls. As a result, the web based solution has the same functionality and UI of the previous desktop solution to a degree that when potential customers saw the solution they did not realize it was a web based application. Visual WebGui allowed to not only creating the desktop look and feel but also the responsiveness and performance of a desktop application. "What impressed us immediately was the responsiveness of the solution compared to other products that are based on other web technology," Pavesi said.

The entire visual part was followed by one person and took around 3 month to develop the user interface. "Had we followed regular ASP.NET development instead the time would have been at least doubled," said Pavesi, adding that "The expected full browser compatibility added to all those already implemented capabilities will make Visual WebGui the perfect tool for developing & deploying Web Enterprise applications."

Screen shots
Login Form for regular Web/Desktop user

View of some master data with filter/search functionality common to all the interface

Transaction that configure how mobile devices has to perform the various Warehouse Functionality and which user can use every functionality