Client is a U.S.-based national newspaper with a daily circulation of more than a million copies. The parent company is a diversified media organization operating newspapers, television and radio stations, magazines, databases and Internet businesses.

Client desired to re-engineer its home delivery and customer care websites that help subscribers maintain their subscription profiles online. Client required 24-hour online customer care to meet service needs, providing responsive, round-the-clock access that allows users to:

• Review and update delivery and billing information.
• Control the delivery of newspaper.
• Discover special promotions and customer benefits.
• Provide any questions and comments.

Client wanted to re-engineer the website to address following issues:

• Reconstitute the site and make it J2EE compliant.
• Enable the application to run on vendor-supported platforms such as iPlanet Web Server, IBM Websphere Application Server.
• Replace homegrown credit card validation by real-time credit card validation service.
• Address performance issues such as response time and concurrent users support.
• Make application configurable, maintainable and scalable.

We re-engineered the home delivery website, gathering the requirements and other related enhancements within the project scope. The recommended technical architecture includes the following tiers:

• Client/presentation layer with Web browsers like IE & Netscape.
• iPlanet as the Web Server.
• IBM Websphere Application Server would host the business logic components and the CrossPlex connectivity components to interact with the CrossPlex mainframe components .
• CrossPlex mainframe components to interact with the mainframe application.
• Data layer with IBM DB2 7.1 database as back-end.
• The Home Delivery system was designed using Model View Controller design pattern for all request response paths.

STRUTS was the underlying framework for the Home Delivery System. STRUTS is an open source, non-proprietary framework that implements the Model-View-Controller architecture.

• Application response time reduced 170% to under 8 seconds for 25 concurrent users.
• Minimal amount of changes required to configure and maintain the application.
• Designed to support additional and new applications.
• Load support was increased 200% to 100 concurrent users.
• Application was made available 24/7.
• Portable across versions of Solaris operating system.