Cetil Sistemas de Informática is a Blumenau-based company (Santa Catarina state) committed to the modernization of Brazil's state-level administration. This leading company in the state market has been in business for 30 years, and has expanded its presence all throughout the country. It provides innovative, updated, and tested solutions that are used by over a thousand Brazilian municipalities.
Jacques Robert Heckmann, from the Municipal Portal team, reported that the Municipal Portal (www.portalmunicipal.com.br) is a product that has been developed with GeneXus' latest versions, and that together with the Municipal Computerization National Program Management Systems (PRONIM), it breaches the gap for Brazilian municipalities to step into the virtual age.
The company already had internal systems that had been developed with GeneXus, and that had been generated in Visual Basic and in Java. Among these, there is an invoicing module that works via the Intranet, a complex contract-recording system, and a system for managing travel-related expenses via the Internet. The three systems have been generated in the Java language with a three-tier architecture.
In order to facilitate and standardize the development of its products, Cetil invests strongly in the adoption of new technologies, keeping the Municipal Portal team as a reference. "Proof of this is that the portal has been developed with the latest GeneXus version in Java. Also, even at a time when the first beta versions of GeneXus 7.5 started being used, the Municipal Portal already comprised most of the tool's new features at the production level", Heckmann assured.
"Some of those new features have been decisive for the adoption of the beta version in the product's development in March, 2001. The capability of working with a Web page divided into Web components should be highlighted as part of the decision-making process. The same can be said about the new type of data, Web transactions, and the new resources developed for the Smart Static Panels, which was an influential factor in this decision", he claimed.
"It became evident that Web-design work would be particularly faster by using GeneXus 7.5", Heckmann added.
The Municipal Portal for Brazilian municipalities hosts and manages information and specific services, which are provided to citizens via the Internet. Currently, it comprises a description of the municipality, as well as its institutions (prefecture, chambers, foundations, and autarchies), the State accounts section (according to stipulations of law 9.755/98 of the Union's Accounts Court and the Fiscal Liability Law), and a section for tourism and leisure.
Portal has been created based on the module-concept, which follows a gradual evolution that matches the desires and resources of each client. The aim is to make it possible for the municipality, through its institutions and its technological growth, to tap into the virtual world providing better-quality services to citizens.
Heckmann took the GeneXus Client/Server and Internet course at NewTech, and three months later, he started developing the portal. Daniel Strack, from NewTech stressed that the course follows the content model proposed by ARTech.
"Next, we are expecting to implement an electronic magazine project, and to free the institution's content management area. Here, Cetil's business units themselves will be able to manage report-publishing and handle data from the municipality and its institutions", announced Heckmann.
Portal development environment:
Servers: Windows 2000
Servlets engine: Jakarta Tomcat 3.3
Database: SQL Server 7.0
Web server: IIS 5
Java virtual machine: Microsoft