.NET Helps Frequent Fliers Soar
JetBlue Airways leverages .NET technology to bring its TrueBlue Flight Gratitude program online.
by Ron Schwarz
January 2003 Issue
The U.S. airline industry as a whole is suffering from a faltering economy and the repercussions of the horrendous events of September 2001. As this article goes to press, major airlines are approaching the federal government hat in hand for bailouts to enable them to continue operations. However, a fairly new airline—JetBlue Airways—is not only bucking the unprofitability trend, but also rethinking how a major airline should operate. It saves on maintenance expenses by purchasing new airplanes of the same type, and it saves on customer expenses by using a 100-percent e-ticket system; it then translates these and other savings into low fares with amenities such as free satellite television for each passenger (see Resources).
JetBlue's practices are paying off handsomely. According to Adam Cohen, JetBlue's manager of development, the company is the "biggest airline start-up in history"; it's already served more than eight million customers and has a market capitalization of more than $20 billion. The "Forbes on Fox" panel sang JetBlue's praises recently as both an airline and an investment.
Part of JetBlue's success is due to its unique emphasis on managing customer logistics through online transactions. When it set out to create its frequent-flier program—named TrueBlue—it evaluated the available development platforms and decided on .NET.
Cohen's team had a head start, because they had already used .NET to write and deploy the shopBlue "company store" project (see Resources). However, although the shopBlue framework looks like a twin to the TrueBlue front end, Cohen points out, "They're really two separate applications; the only thing we were able to carry over was the experience of building a .NET application."
The TrueBlue users see a clean, easy-to-navigate Web interface (see Figure 1). Its simplicity belies some fancy footwork behind the scenes. The frequent-flier system must integrate data from different sources, including the third-party Open Skies reservation system. Cohen's team wrote .NET Windows Services that access the back-end databases and integrate with the core code, which drives the ASPX output for the users' browsers. This complex choreography also includes a smattering of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to tie it all together. Cohen explains: "After you log into the Web site, you're on an ASPX page; when you're booking, you're on CGI pages that drive the booking engine. The login data gets passed back and forth between CGI pages and ASPX pages. It was a big job to get them to work together, but we got Open Skies to help us out, and it actually works pretty well."
Making Code Fly
Even though the members of Cohen's six-developer team describe themselves as a VB6 shop prior to the move to .NET, they wrote the TrueBlue system's back end in C#. Cohen says, "We'd gone with VB6 for productivity, because we could produce a lot more with VB than we could with Java or C++." So why move to C# rather than VB.NET? Cohen says: "We migrated to C# to familiarize our developers with C/Java syntax. C++ offers performance gains over the other languages on the transactional/COM+ side. We figured it would be easy for C# developers to adapt to C++ if necessary." Cohen originally considered doing the project in legacy ASP 3.0 with C++ 6.0, but after working with a couple of prototypes the team never deployed he says, "We re-evaluated things in terms of productivity and how much code we could produce, or how little code it took to produce the program, and we decided to go with .NET."
Cohen describes.NET as "the next phase of evolution" in Microsoft developer products, and cites the performance of ADO.NET in conjunction with SQL Server 2000 as a deciding factor supporting JetBlue's move. He says the performance "blows away competing database-management technologies." After considering and discarding the alternative technologies in favor of a pure .NET solution, the team crafted the project without relying on any third-party tools. They did it all using C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, T-SQL, and SQL Server 2000, running on Windows 2000 and dished up by Internet Information Services 5.0.
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