Wine Production System
Wine Production System: Browser-based Vineyard, Winemaking and TTB Compliance Management System.As a long-time wine enthusiast I started tinkering in the spring of 2015 with the excellent Cellar Tracker website and mobile app to manage my collection. My entrepreneurial mind started pondering the correlation of user reviews on sites like Vivino with actual purchases and cellar inventories, and automating the download of wine club purchases to cellar inventory systems. When an opportunity arose to innovate for the wine industry with a prominent Santa Rosa producer, I jumped at the chance.
My background with technology migrations from mainframes to modern SQL and desktop\browser applications for companies like Crawford\RSG turned out to be an excellent fit for the team that builds and maintains their proprietary wine production and inventory management platform. As I completed my work assignments and learned more about their business processes and technology stacks I kept an eye out for opportunities to further modernize, optimize and enhance their systems and processes.
It soon became clear that both the system and the team could benefit from a serious expansion of their AJAX\JSON\Database web services. I took the stock SQL query capability provided by the CNX Valence middleware and rewrote it to execute DML and DDL commands, execute stored procedures and return open cursors as JSON datasets, handle batches of SQL commands and their results, return complete column and system status metadata, as well as other productivity and performance features. The greatest challenge and reward associated with this project was navigating the scarcity of documentation and examples for the IBM iSeries\RPGLE programming language and DB2 SQL database interface. Trial and error was the path to success.
With a super-charged web-service interface in place I was able to build a fully customizable and data-driven Data Analytics reporting\charting module for the system users. This module makes use of the excellent Sencha Ext JS 6.5 pivot grid and charting package .
Contributions to this Project Include:
- Performed major expansion and optimization of AJAX\JSON\Database web service layer.
- Standardized, documented and illustrated advanced SQL programming techniques for the development team.
- Created data-driven user interface components allowing creation and deployment of reporting and charting features to meet ongoing user data requests without having to rebuild and redeploy the web application.
- Standardized, automated, and documented application build and deployment processes.
- Created written and video-based training materials for development team and system end-users.
- Created a robust content-sensitive help system with module links to document and video training materials.
- Ongoing IBM DB2 Database normalization, modernization, and optimization.
- Optimized Apache web server settings to improve data access times and reduce network congestion and http request failures.