Enterprise Application Development with LiveCode
In this case study we look at LiveCode for enterprise development. The University of Vienna uses a LiveCode-built solution to manage every aspect of day to day running of the University. The University of Vienna is the largest university in Central Europe. There are around 86,000 students and 8,900 employees at the University, teaching hundreds of courses and engaged in research. We spoke to Hartmut Eich, from the software development team at the University about their choice of LiveCode and asked them why they upgraded to the latest version of the LiveCode platform.
“The LiveCode system includes a module to perform any task necessary for operating a large University. Notable modules include a scheduler for course timetables, a room allocation system, the enrollment details for every student and administration of the staff payroll. There are half a million lines of LiveCode in 43,000 procedures and functions in the system. These have been built as approximately 1300 fully independent modules, each of which is stored in an Oracle database."
One of the modules from the LiveCode system
”The project originated as a system for the creation of a database-based applications. One of the key features of the system is the way that the data and the code is stored in the database itself. The database stores all of its own meta-structure – a description of the table structure, together with the relationships between the tables, along with all the code for the user interface."
A scheduling screen from the LiveCode system
Hartmut went on to describe the domain specific language, Augmented SQL that the University uses in this application.
"LiveCode was an ideal choice for this project for many reasons. At the heart of the system is an augmented version of SQL that ties SQL together with the LiveCode language model. This is essentially a domain-specific language, tailored to fully support the needs of this application.”
We asked Hartmut why they had chosen to migrate their application to the latest version of LiveCode.
"We upgraded to the latest version of LiveCode to take advantage of the Unicode improvements that have been incorporated over the years. New legislation means that we have to be able to represent a student’s name within the system correctly in their native language.”
“Another key benefit is the ability to fully customize the development environment. Our system uses its own customized set of tools, including a Code Editor written for the project. The editor cross-references the code stored in the database, making it easy to navigate the huge code-base contained across all the modules and to make changes. The LiveCode development environment is written in itself and we wanted to integrate the latest version of the LiveCode IDE tools into our system. "
The Customized Code Editor for Editing Code in the Oracle Database
The system uses a custom external-DLL that allows Revolution to call the Oracle database.
"We are working with RunRev on an upgrade to this DLL. A couple of years ago they upgraded the DLL to work with the Oracle 10 OCI and added numerous new features, including advanced block handling, error recovery handling, typed array handling and introduced additional new syntax to the augmented-SQL language. This year we need to upgrade the DLL to work with Oracle 11."
Vienna University have multi-user development license for LiveCode. Their in-house team keeps the system up to date and adapts it to the changing requirements of the University.
"The design of the system makes it easy for a team to work on the project. Each module is completely independent and stored in the Oracle database. This makes it straightforward to work on it in parallel."
You can visit the Vienna University web site at: