Building enterprise applications using open source

Building enterprise applicationswith open source

Peter Batty Ubisense

@pmbatty

• Brief background on our customers

• Our software stack and how we got there

• Business models

• Simplicity

• Field applications, online and offline

OVERVIEW

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Physical Network Inventory 4.1 Product Description

© 2007 General Electric Company All rights reserved Page 15 of 65

groupings built by the system administrators. This ensures that end users only see the sets of equipment relevant to their work, both speeding up data entry and ensuring that the correct equipment is used for network designs.

The population of this catalogue is the first task that must be completed before a Physical Network Inventory installation can be rolled out to end users. To assist in populating the catalogue individual and/or groups of specifications can be imported and exported.

3.3 Strand And Structure

Physical Network Inventory provides support for both overhead and underground strand and structure. Data model entities and tools are provided to allow for the documentation, design and management of a wide variety of ‘holes and poles’.

Favourites can be used to very quickly and accurately design new network. This maybe using a standard combination of entities, for example a combination of trenches and manholes used for a particular customer connection, or individual entities. The relevant network equipment can also be inserted during the same operation greatly increasing end user productivity.

All network entities that are related to a structure, for example splices housed inside underground structures such as manholes or pole-mounted splices are related to the structure and can be accessed from the ‘owning’ structure, making it simple to interrogate the network from the supporting structures.

3.3.1 Underground structures

The following entities can be represented in the underground network:

Underground routes represent the location of the trench, bore or plough which contains (or will contain) the ducting and\or cables of the network. Information about the dimensions of the trench, i.e. depth and width of reinstatement layers, the type of backfill material used and surface material can all be recorded if desired.

Conduits model the structures within the trench. Conduits are used to protect the cables within the trench and to make it easier to add new cables without the need to dig. Conduits are not needed to associate cable to an underground route - as in a plough route where cable is directly buried for example. Conduits may be ‘nested’ to model sub-conduit network constructions. There are no limitations on the number of levels of nesting that can be modelled. Conduits are also used to model micro-tubes as used in blown fibre deployments. Below is a picture of a trench as conduits are being installed and on the right is the cross-sectional view of this trench within the application.

Figure 11: Conduits in an Underground Route or trench

Underground utility boxes are the structures that provide access to the underground network of ducts and conduits, examples of underground utility boxes include manholes, vaults or hand holes. Standard configurations of underground utility boxes can be created and saved for re-use. A typical manhole can be seen below and to its right the butterfly diagram managed in the application. For more details see Figure 19.

For Internal GE Use Only

Customers: utilities and telcos

Photo by ☺ Lee J Haywood - http://flic.kr/p/7iX7f5

http://flic.kr/p/7D7rd

http://flic.kr/p/7iX7f5

Sample cable data

Detailed asset maps from Smallworld

Sample cable data

Detailed asset maps from Smallworld, with live customer status overlaid

Sample cable data


Sample cable data


SAMPLE CUSTOMER• Large communications company with 6 million subscribers across

~20 states

• 23 geographic regions created for offline use – from one common master database

• Offline databases vary from 136MB to 22GB

• Incremental updates applied to all offline databases nightly

• 5000 online users, ~400 offline users active so far, growing to 2000

• Weekly features updated ~2.3m total, ~250,000 largest region

Smallworld

flic.kr/p/7rnNAD

flic.kr/p/7NEJzF

Pervasive and SimpleLocation is now

in consumer applications

Software stackVersion 1



Functionality Cost Support

Terms PredictabilityFlexibility

BUSINESS MODELS

• Sell support, services

• e.g. Boundless

• Sell hosting

• e.g. CartoDB, MapBox

• Hybrid closed and open source

• Google, Safe, Ubisense

SIMPLICITY

We are building applications for

the 95%of people in an organization who are not GIS users

20

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do”

TOPICS• Familiarity

• Panning and zooming

• Search (including queries)

• Minimal layers

• Focused applications

• Network links

• Rather than “trace”

FIELD APPLICATIONSONLINE AND OFFLINE

DEMO OVERVIEWThis presentation features screen shots that step through a demo of Ubisense

myWorld for damage assessment. The demo features two separate users:

Operations center user, with overview of situation, including data from all field users

Damage assessor with laptop in the field, capturing damage assessment data

Operations Center

Operations center overview map – currently all is quiet, no damage shown

Damage Assessor in Field

Currently online (wireless)

WiFi is on

Damage assessment user in the field, currently in online mode (with wireless connection)


Create damage pointDamage assessor creates damage assessment point in the field


Damage point is created in local database and displayed on map on laptop

Operations Center

Syncs to operations center within ~1 minute, damage point displayed and overview map updated


Offline

WiFi is off

Back in the field, we are now in offline mode (wireless connection is lost). Google Map has disappeared here.


Now we are displaying OpenStreetMap as an offline map instead of Google (which can’t be used offline)


In offline mode, we can continue to display maps, select objects, and search for assets


We can also continue to create damage points while in offline mode (which are stored locally)


We have now created two more damage points offline

Operations Center

Back in the operations center, we still just see the single damage point at the moment


Online

WiFi is on

Now the field laptop has a network connection again and is back online, so the damage data can sync

Operations Center

The data has synced and so we now see three damage points back in the operations center.

Operations Center

We can report on the damage points and get aggregate information

Field users can also use tablets like iPad or Android, which support taking photos.

Take a photo on the iPad

Operations Center

Operations Center also gets immediate visibility of photo (assuming user online)Photos can also be emailed in from any smart phone

OFFLINE REQUIREMENTS

• Cross platform

• Android, iOS, Windows 7 onwards (and web)

• Need ability to sync large datasets (gigabytes) for some situations

• In other situations may be able to use smaller datasets (for single job, like walking an electrical circuit)

DATABASE SYNC

• Sync of bulk GIS data

• Initially read only for short term applications

• Typically want to do nightly over non-cellular connection

• Time critical data like damage assessment

• Want to sync as soon as possible (two way)

• Needs to connect / disconnect / sync transparently

APPROACHES TO MOBILE DEVELOPMENT

THREE ARCHITECTURES TRIED

PostGISMapfish

Offlinestorage

SpatiaLiteJavaScript

Replication Caching

ARCHITECTURE 1 LAPTOP REPLICA

PostGISMapfish

Windows (or Linux or Mac) only

Use identical software stack to main server

Need custom replication - haven’t found PostgreSQL replication for sometimes disconnected model

Pros: Simplest to implementCons: Laptop only, heavyweight

REPLICA CONCEPT

Master database

Local database

Potentially multiple gigabytes (raster tiles)

Incremental update is important

Full or partial (spatial) replica

ARCHITECTURE 2CORDOVA REPLICA• Have our web application running offline

on Android and iOS

• Replaced PostGIS with SQLite - for geometry and attributes, and also tiles

• Wrote JavaScript wrappers to replace (basic) MapFish services offline

• Refactored code so small number of classes contain differences between online and offline - tile and database access

ARCHITECTURE

PostGIS

MapFish (REST API)

SQLite (mbTiles)

Tile server

myWorld clientLeaflet

myWorld server (Python)

SpatiaLite

JavaScript wrappers

SQLite (mbTiles)

Tile server

myWorld clientLeaflet

myWorld server (JavaScript)

ONLINE OFFLINE

CAUTION WITH IOS

• Apple terms and conditions regarding approval and software distribution can be a major pain

• All code, and all changes, need to be reviewed by Apple - even for testing (this has tightened up recently, since they bought TestFlight)

• If you need custom apps for individual customers there is a separate Enterprise Developer Program or Volume Purchase Program, which each have their own complications

“ADVANCED HYBRID” APPROACH

Higher level HTML & JavaScript code Includes myWorld core, plus any applications and customizations

Sync common code package to each device as needed

Use Cordova to create single executable for each platform (Electron on Windows 7)

Low level code Handles data storage and access using SQLite, and Web View which is a container for HTML & JavaScript code

ARCHITECTURE 3HTML5 OFFLINE

• Cache smaller amounts of data usingHTML5 offline capabilities

• More dynamic and easier to deploythan bulk replication

HTML5 SUMMARY

• Tried various approaches including caching individual tiles, caching mbTiles files and reading then with sql.js, caching geoJSON

• LargeLocalStorage was a useful library

• Worked reasonably well for small data volumes

• But a number of issues including limitations on data size, inconsistency across browsers, general flakiness, and inability to manage offline data directly within the application

OFFLINE SUMMARY• It will be great when we have universal wireless coverage!

• Today, offline is still harder than you would hope

• Large scale robust sync for enterprises is not rocket science, but a lot of detailed work to do well

• HTML5 caching has a lot of promise, is workable in some scenarios today, but still not quite fully baked

• We have gone with Cordova which gives you much more control over local storage, and most of the benefits of HTML5

OVERALL SUMMARY

• We have built a very robust enterprise web and mobile geospatial product based on open source foundations including PostGIS, GeoServer, Leaflet, SpatiaLite and Cordova

• We have completed large implementations in several top 10 utility and telecommunications companies, in conservative IT environments

• Our experience with all the open source technology we’ve used has been great

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Technology

Building enterprise applications using open source