The United States Forest Service utilizes a Weather Information Management System (WIMS) to assist in the identification of potential forest fire threats and to assess strategies for combating wild fires. The legacy WIMS consisted of some 60 odd programs written in Oracle Forms 3.1. The application executed under CICS and interacted with an Oracle database. Both software components were hosted on an IBM System/390 mainframe running MVS. The Forest Service sought the services of EIC to reengineer WIMS to provide better access to more useful data.

EIC migrated the WIMS legacy system from an IBM 3270 display interface protocol to a web browser interface protocol. The new environment consists of hosting the web interface on an IBM R/6000-F50 server running the AIX operating system and keeping the Oracle database on the IBM System/390. The objective of the project was to provide the 2,300 users of the system with the same functionality with the web interface as they had with the legacy system. EIC investigated alternatives for migrating the Oracle Forms programs to the web and decided that the most cost effective long-term solution was to migrate the Oracle Forms programs to Java2 executing under Oracles Application Server (OAS) software. During the course of this project EIC developed a Requirements Document, Design Document, and a Test Plan and Procedures Document. The software was developed and tested and version 1.0 of the system is now in operation. Because of our success on this project, EIC has been awarded a follow-on contract to migrate the system to Oracle 8i, to web-enable other functionality, to assess data warehouse alternatives, and to maintain the system.