The service points at having a practical use, the security and the data's confidentiality, Daniel Mirol, who founded the Mirol study, explained. (http://www.mirol.com) It is an Argentinean firm that is focused on consulting and developing administrative/accounting systems oriented to the small and medium enterprise. It has been in the software market for 17 years and it has been working with fourth generation tools since 1991 (programs' automatic generation). In 1998 it adopted GeneXus in order to design, prototype, generate and automatically maintain applications that work on different platforms and database's engines.
The Mirol Study joined its experience in consulting and developing systems for enterprises with the advantages that the Internet provides to make products and services available at a global level and at competitive prices by creating BaseOnWeb (http://www.baseonweb.com), the service that has been on line since 21st September 2000.
'When we observed the global tendency to using the Internet as a private global net, and that a variety of software is operated from there (web mail, virus control, group agendas, office products, business' management applications, and other), we decided to change and fully enter this ASP paradigm', Mirol explained. BaseOnWeb was completely developed with GeneXus Ceibo version generating CGI's with Visual Basic 5.0 on Access, and in the middle of January 2001 the on-line application was updated. 'In order to update it we used GeneXus Solís version because we wanted to try XML, WAP and the web transactions that save us a lot of work. We decided to try and not to wait for GeneXus 7.0 to be released, and as it worked perfectly, we left the plan for passing to WebClasses on SQL for a few months later', Mirol outlined.
BaseOnWeb was selected to participate in the international forum on risky capital inside the information's technologies' sector, IVKF 2000 (International Venture Capital Forum), last November in Madrid. The enterprise, which nowadays contracts the hosting services of a local ISP supplier, is planning to have its own data center.
Regarding its experience in the development of this project for the Internet, Mirol remembered that the first prototypes were done with GeneXus 6.1 in April 2000. In those days, 'we had a home in HTML that called the applications' menu, that was the first CGI and then everything continued with CGI'. When GeneXus Ceibo version was released 'we started working on making the site executable and we realized that we did not have the knowledge or the skills to make it the needed esthetics'. 'In that moment we incorporated a web development team that made the site for us and that fixed a general esthetics, and we worked on the applications', he outlined. ' GeneXus has a lot to do with this change. I think we would never have thought of this if we had not had GeneXus. There is no need for me to say it because all of us know it, but I like to outline it because there are many GeneXus developers that think that getting into this Internet thing is not for them, and the truth is that it is as easy or difficult as any traditional application', Mirol stated.
Nowadays, the Mirol Study is working on development for passing everything to the CGI site and on adding new services such as troubles' report, queries, suggestions, follow-up, newsletter's automatic reception, members' management, forums, etc. 'As BaseOnWeb's business is renting applications on our server, as soon as we have the 'web services' ready, it will be available for other sites in the ASP modality', Mirol announced.