An application at the foundation of a growing California city’s inspection operations got renovated recently, as the City of Long Beach added graphical interfaces and access to PC form letters to a 15-year-old system written in COBOL and PowerHouse.

The transformation serves as an example of how HP 3000 programs customized over the years can keep pace with an organization’s needs. The renovation at Long Beach saved the customer millions of dollars in alternative technology choices.

When David Evans in the Department of Planning and Building began the renovation, the HP 3000 application “didn’t give the appearance of being the Windows interface look-alike which is the buzzword everybody is going to,” he said. The software tracks case histories of building code enforcement in Long Beach.

The city of 500,000 has ordinances which require building owners to maintain the structural integrity of homes, or pay fines if they fail to do so. Inspectors determine proactively if houses are becoming deteriorated, then issue orders to bring buildings up to code. The HP 3000 system tracks this process, but it was built using old-looking VPlus screens, and had no direct link to the form letters which inspectors used to correspond with homeowners.

The IT department wanted to bring its application up to the modern graphical standards of Windows, and take its paper-based files of letters and link them to the systems. Evans said an exhaustive analysis of alternative existing applications in other planning and building departments turned up bad news: Those sophisticated enough were “extremely outside of our budget.”

He said a conservative quote on a replacement system, including Windows NT hardware, was $1.5 million. “We went back to the vendor and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ They sharpened their pencils and said it was $800,000 for the application and hardware, and another $400,000 for data conversion out of our existing datasets,” Evans said.

The IT manager admits that the city has “horrendously big datasets,” some as big as three million records. After deciding the city didn’t want to pay money to “automate something we’d already thoroughly automated,” the reasonable choice was to give the existing application a new look and better connectivity to the rest of the city’s IT infrastructure.

Accuracy counts

A key goal was giving field inspectors a better way to keep a history of correspondence with homeowners. “Because we have the power of law behind us, we need to have very accurate records,” Evans explained. Saving letters of violations and notices and board hearings had been done by filing hard copies. The city employed VB-View (previously called ROGEN/3000 and now being offered though Bradmark) and the consulting help of VB-View creator Robert Hooper of Robust Systems to aid in the system makeover.

Not that all of the expertise and tools came from outside the Long Beach shop. Evans said he reworked the PowerHouse code for the system to generate the letters needed, embedding HTML escape sequences in Quiz reports and using an HTML-sensitive Microsoft Word macro. Evans added additional escape sequences in the reports for indenting and formatting.

VB-View now interacts with Samba/iX, the Windows file sharing environment, to integrate the PC-based letters with HP 3000 data at Long Beach. “It’s wonderful, and it will really enhance our environment,” Evans said of the interplay between his 3000 systems and laptop PCs.

Fifty laptops with AirCards let field inspectors take a mobile office into the city. The screens for the application are now PC-resident since being reworked with VB-View, so the relatively slow (19.2 Kbaud) speed of the AirCard connection still delivers acceptable performance.

“The Visual Basic program is downloaded every morning from the Samba environment onto the PC when the users log on,” Evans said. “Once that’s done, the screens are then resident on the laptop, and VB-View is making calls from that screen across the network using Telnet services. The only thing being transmitted is the data.”

Visual Basic integration

Combining VB-View and Samba provides a front-end and sharing mechanism for the letters, generated within PowerHouse. Microsoft Word receives the letter with HTML inside it, strips out the HTML and formats the letter using the data from the HP 3000. There were some issues that HTML didn’t provide, such as tabbing and indenting, but Evans developed additional escape sequences to handle these.

“The escape sequences are in the source code,” he explained, “so when you write a report, the output has those embedded in the output from the Quiz documents.”

Letterhead and memo headings are also PC-resident, “so the letter is smart enough to know that it’s to be produced on letterhead or a memo. You don’t have to load letterhead into your printer; it prints it automatically,” Evans said. These letters are saved back into the HP 3000 via Samba.

“The HP and Samba are like one unit,” Evans said. “The letter appears in the 3000 application.” Field inspectors can click on a letter to see it on their laptop, populated with data from the HP 3000. After 14 days the letter becomes a read-only document, “and now that we’ve got VB-View, we can save these to the HP 3000, and now you’ve got a true case history,” he added.

With fines as high as $15,000 for non-compliance, case histories of correspondence are vital to the city’s operation. “When we take them to court, we have to have perfect records,” Evans said. Manila folders with case histories have been replaced with files on the city’s Series 939 HP 3000.

The cost for the VB-View software and Hooper’s consulting was around $50,000, a tiny fraction of the $1.5 million estimate the city got to replace its 3000 application. In the future the application will remap information from the ArcView Unix mapping server to the HP 3000, and display layers of drawings on PCs as well — effectively merging geographic information systems with the 3000.