Best Deployment Visesh Infotecnics

Delhi-based Visesh Infotecnics has bagged the 'Best Deployment' award for
a project that it implemented for the Revenue Department of The Royal Thai
Government. Visesh is one of the few solution providers that had ventured
overseas for deployment of full-scale projects.

The project, valued at Rs 4.18 crore, was for the value-added tax (VAT) and
special business tax (SBT) of in Bangkok and 23 other districts of Thailand. The
Revenue Department is the highest tax collection agency under the Ministry of
Finance in Thailand. Its responsibilities are to collect and administer the
taxes and it was using IBM mainframe for over a decade for its IT requirements.

These applications were developed using Cobol and SQL/DS. The existing
applications are in batches and do not provide much data retrieval capability to
assist auditors in data processing or audit criteria to tax returns. The
Government embarked on a program to modernize the Revenue Department by
employing new technology.

Visesh redeveloped two of the applications, VAT and SBT, in J2EE environment.
The project involves full software development life cycle i.e. Requirements
Study, Detail Design, Development, System test and Implementation. The system
requires handling of large volume of data related to filing of tax returns.

For this purpose, the project requires a specified performance criterion to
be met. Tax calculations are complex and the system requires interfaces with
various other applications. The prototyping approach has been followed for
capturing the user requirements. As these applications are for the Government
department, the user interfaces (screens and reports) are in Thai language. The
project involved translation of user interfaces in Thai after the

development of the system in English.

Visesh designed the application and developed it based on multi-tier
architecture, using a browser-based thin client that displays forms and menus.
The client forwards all its requests to the web server, which services the
request related to the display using either Java Server Pages (JSP) or HTML
files. The requests that relate to database processing or application logic are
forwarded to VAT/SBT application server. This server uses Enterprise Java Beans
(EJBs) to service these requests. In case the business / application logic
require access to the data, the data is accessed from the database server using
JDBC.

Visesh used Rational Rose application development tools for system modeling,
analysis and design in the project. Software configuration and version
management was done with Rational Clear Case, while an IBM WebSphere server with
an MQ series integrator. Other IBM products were used for application
development environment and backend database for storage of complete application
database.

The IBM WebSphere application development environment is fully compliant with
the current J2EE specifications. The WebSphere server is a comprehensive
application server.