Transport Management on the web

The web makes for great transport management. Well, by definition transporting things means they are moving and the Internet covers all areas (well with occasional dropouts). So what are the problems with getting transport management into the Internet cloud? Well, there is trust, there is connectivity and there is safety.

One of the problems of cloud computing is trust. How safe do you feel knowing that someone in a software company can view your data if it is loaded onto their servers. There is nothing I can do about this viewing problem, except to say that even if you had the the application loaded locally your feelings of security are largely misplaced. Most programmers would know how to transfer every bit of that data to some remote site. The relationship of client to application developer is essentially one of trust.

Another problem with cloud computing that if your not hosting with Amazon or Google, well you don't feel safe having all your data in your cloud. What if the hosting company disappears? One final issue with cloud computing is that if a client needs to interface their data with other in-house systems. It turns out these last 2 issues can be solved in 1 fell swoop with data replication.

What is required is that you run a process that polls the server, and downloads any changes to a local database. It is relatively easy for the local polling service to request all changes since ????, provided the database has been built correctly. This is how the problem at http://www.freightfreedom.com/ was solved. The last pieces to the puzzle was to make it cross-platform so that the database could download to Linux or to Windows, and to abstract the database layer so that the client could choose the database to store the local data into.

This solves both of the problems of connectivity and safety. You have a local copy of the data so you can connect other applications to it. You have a local copy of the data so that if the hosting company goes under you don't lose your data. It is in a database format that is you have skills to deal with, or you could find someone to help with.

So the solution to 2 of the problems is data replication. Sorry I don't have the answer for the issue of trust but, 2 out of 3 ain't bad you will just have to trust me on that.