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returntoscotland.com turns to OpenBase
"We tore OpenBase apart, compared it to SQL and Oracle. For price and performance, and what we needed to do, OpenBase was the obvious choice."
returntoscotland.com is Scotland's top jobs and relocation website. Begun with the objective of recruiting highly qualified expatriate Scots in the financial services industry back to Scotland, the site has since expanded to recruit resident Scots and even non-Scots.
"The emphasis has shifted from 'return' to 'turn to' Scotland," says Ian Tickell, Business Development Director for returntoscotland.com in Edinburgh, Scotland. The site, which was launched in June, 2001 has ramped up rapidly, attracting about 25,000 job-seekers a month and servicing clients in investment, equity, insurance and mortgage firms with open positions to fill.
Tickell, who was operations manager for another Scottish jobs site, both before and after it was acquired by Monster.com, joined returntoscotland.com in late 2000. At that time, the company had a small website running under PHP.
"The site amounted to little more than half dozen HTML pages, linking back to a little database no search facilities, no presentation, no depth, no breadth, no nothing," says Tickell, who set out to develop a brand new site with the functionality required.
Flexibility, power, scalability in just months
In the course of his research, Tickell received almost 20 different bids and proposals for custom and rebuilt solutions running under PHP, Oracle, and various flavors of SQL.
"None of them impressed me," he says. "I was looking for a platform that could support a very complex database schema with very fast searches, but not affect the front-end and slow down delivery to the end user. There were implications that inside all of the databases I looked at that this is exactly what would happen."
Philosophically, Tickell liked the idea of open code and Linux, but he worried about support if there were problems. Candidates worldwide needed to be able to access returntoscotland.com 7x24 to search for jobs, register online, store their resumes and access private folders with the latest relevant job listings. Clients needed round-the-clock access to add new positions, modify their listings and use management tools to measure results, such as the number of people viewing a position, the number applying, and so on.
"What I needed was flexibility, power, and scalability -- and the ability to deliver the application quickly, in just 3-4 months," says Tickell, calling in a local company he'd worked with before, CamVista Ltd. (www.CamVista.net). Euan Maxwell, a developer at the firm with an extensive WebObjects experience worked with Tickell to develop detailed flow grams, did his own research, and came back with the OpenBase SQL database server product.
"We tore OpenBase apart, compared it to SQL, compared it to Oracle," says Tickell. "For the price and performance, and for what we required it to do, I didn't see any contention. OpenBase was the obvious choice."
Rock solid dependability and performance
Comparing the performance of OpenBase over the past 20 months to his experience managing websites running on PHP, SQL and Oracle, Tickell says he's never seen a database that has consistently stayed up so long and been so reliable.
"OpenBase is an extremely impressive piece of software. It's rock solid. It's like a diesel engine, you throw the fuel in one end and it goes forever. And no matter how much traffic we throw at it, the performance doesn't change."
The one time returntoscotland did need support, OpenBase identified and resolved the problem within 8 hours and that includes the 5-hour time lag across the Atlantic, Tickell is quick to point out. "The level of support was wonderful."
Easy to deploy, quick to adapt
In addition to its performance and stability, Tickell has also been impressed by how fast and easy OpenBase is to deploy.
"OpenBase and WebObjects just work in conjunction so well," says Tickell. "And OpenBase affords the automation of so many functions, with libraries and automatic generation of SQL and Java calls. Modules can be constructed to specification singly and separately, and tested very quickly. If it works, it gets bolted on. If it fails, it can be rewritten and redeployed quickly, without adversely affecting either the test, or the live, applications."
These features are also proving valuable to returntoscotland when it comes to spinning off new services quickly and at a very competitive price. For example, the company is currently developing customized corporate career sites for a financial services company and a medical diagnostics firm.
"Because we already have the solid application built with WebObjects and OpenBase, all we have to do to deploy a new site is to go back to our WO Modeller, change the content of the drop-downs, reposition them on the front-end pages. OpenBase then accepts the new Java classes and we've got a completely new operational commercial site with a tested engine in the back."
"OpenBase is a dream to use," concludes Tickell. "Once the database schema was finalized within WebObject's EOModeller, the software then provided the developer with a seamless framework to access the database structure and data elements could simply be 'drag and dropped' onto the page templates. Then OpenBase picks it up and runs with it and never trips."
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