Data System of the Finnish Profitability Bookkeeping

Abstract

MTT Economic research monitors the economy and financial development of agricultural and horticultural enterprises and reindeer farms on the basis of farm level accountancy data. Around 1000 enterprises from all over Finland are voluntarily participating the profitability bookkeeping providing their bookkeeping data to be used as research and statistical material. During the long history since 1912 and especially in recent decades the data system has gone through many technical changes from manual systems to desktop adb-systems and finally to internet based web application. The system development work has also produced many significant innovations. The data of farms has been recorded since 1998 by using dedicated bookkeeping program martti, which is a windows based desktop application. We are now in the process of deploying the existing application to a web application so that the data can be stored online over internet. The recent PowerBuilder versions allow deploying the existing PowerBuilder desktop applications as web applications after making required changes in the application code. PowerBuilder uses the .NET infrastructure to generate the ASP.NET web application. By taking advantage of this feature of PowerBuilder, we have deployed our desktop application martti to the web application. The web application consists of three tier architecture: the front end with the client browser, PowerBuilder components on the Internet Information Services (IIS) server and the back end database to store the data. Web applications have several advantages over traditional client-server applications relating to i.e. installation, application maintenance, dynamic settings and management.The simple PowerBuilder applications work on the internet after deploying without problems, however the complex applications may not work smoothly on the internet. Because of complex architecture of martti application, there are also some challenges and limitations to deploy and use as a web application.