Case Study: ActivePerl Pro Studio improves quality and delivery of airplane test data

Customer Profile

A major aerospace company was faced with migrating their network to Windows. This required standardizing on a new language for in-house scripting. Perl was chosen for its ability to develop complex programs, easily manipulate data, and provide web-based information management.

Challenge

The customer wanted to use Perl to improve the quality and delivery speed of their airplane test data by streamlining and automating the process for data analysis.

Engineers unfamiliar with Perl found using text editors to be non-intuitive and time-consuming. Experienced Perl users needed a way to further improve the efficiency of their programming efforts.

Faced with tight deadlines and a lack of resources, they needed a solution that would facilitate development and deployment, allowing them to easily overcome Perl's steep learning curve and deliver measurable results.

Solution

The customer chose ActivePerl Pro Studio, a complete Perl solution suite for application development, that includes Komodo, the Perl Dev Kit, and Visual Perl.

ActivePerl Pro Studio provided robust programming tools, allowing the engineers to easily develop applications used to gather test results and publish them in multiple formats. In-depth resource information and personalized assistance brought new users up to speed quickly and painlessly.

By creating and bundling applications for analysis, the customer hoped to improve upon their previous solution by automating repetitive tasks and empowering end users to easily create and view accurate data. Two ActivePerl Pro Studio software tools provided this solution:

Komodo is a full-featured, integrated development environment. Komodo's intuitive editor and debugger reduced the learning curve and shortened development time. The Rx Toolkit, a visual interface for creating and debugging regular expressions, allowed even novice users to easily build sophisticated tools for pattern matching - a critical advantage for this project.

The Perl Dev Kit includes a suite of tools for Perl application deployment. The PerlApp component allowed the engineers to bundle their applications as ready-to-run executables, providing end users with an easily administered method of gathering data from multiple sources.

Benefits

ActivePerl Pro Studio delivered an integrated solution that enabled the customer to:

• Automate repetitive tasks — in one instance, a single data report that used to take two engineers one week to produce is now automated and updated daily
• Significantly reduce the margin of error in their reporting
• Standardize their analysis data
• Allow engineers to focus on their primary responsibilities
• Empower end users with a turnkey solution for generating reports

In the words of the department Group Lead, "There is no comparison between our previous solution and ActivePerl Pro Studio. ActivePerl Pro Studio made working on this job fun again. ActiveState has done a commendable job."