One of our Blackstone Engineering Teams on a Homeland Security gig successfully deployed a Federal IT Investment Management application recently…from conception to production in 3 months! Lots of factors involved: great team chemistry; efficient knowledge transfer from requirements and development through testing to production; demanding excellence and faster response times from government and contractors; using the latest open technologies to speed up delivery.

According to a team member – “above all else, success was driven by a smart and patient government/contractor team that was never flustered or deterred from its delivery goal. The mix of open technologies included Grails to speed up development – which itself included Spring, Hibernate, Sitemesh and of course Groovy. We deployed to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, running behind an IIS 7.5 front end (via ISAPI Redirect). Our data tier was SQL Server 2008, with SSRS (SQL’s Reporting Services) serving up reports. We actually used two databases, one that was optimized for the front end application (that ingests data), and the second optimized for reporting and business intelligence. The data structure itself is very OO (object oriented), which also necessitated having two different databases.

One of the great efficiency gains, right at the beginning, was in the requirements phase when we used Grails to rapidly prototype the application and demonstrate the required data model – in action – with a real application. That sped up the requirements and allowed us to get into development pretty much instantly”.

Find out more about great open standards-based IT application engineering results, and Federal IT career opportunities, at Blackstone Technology Consulting.