What is NetDate?

NetDate is a version management application

The Problem we Tried to Solve

As a business’s customer base grows and it expands geographically, so does its use of technology. This technological growth brings with it the need to set up and manage an infrastructure that can support the business’s client activity. With the demand for a dynamic nature, the infrastructure will change resulting in software updates and the addition of new software services. The task of deploying new software to a production environment across a wide geographical area and configuring it becomes daunting, in that it may take weeks to fully accomplish; as well as updating existing software that are already in production, while trying to provide a seamless transition from one version to another, take as much time as setting up a new service. Another issue that some organization face is that of reliability as it relates to application configuration concurrency where, if precautions are not taken, a distributed application may enter production with different settings and configuration because of miscommunication. This excess time and manpower used to deploy and manage an application or infrastructure are the current issues being faced. What we proposed as a solution to these issues is a version management system, which we refer to as NetDate. Throughout this document we will examine the background of the system, the methods used to develop such system and the results provided after the implementation.

Benefits of our application

Uniformity - Users can be using the same version of an application if the administrator of the system requires this. For example if a University requires all the computers in a lab to be running a specific version of a application; the application can be updated on all machines in that lab simultaneously.

If all machines have the same version of an application then problems with the application can be assessed quicker. Once one problem presents itself on one machine with the application, a fix can be implemented to solve that version specific issue on the other machines on that network.

What We Accomplished

  • Development of a client that facilitates the update, downgrade and install of specific application versions on Ubuntu 16.04 operating system on described architecture.

  • A workbench for NetDate to add and manage client groups and applications lists. This workbench is where an administrator is able to add clients, backend API servers, create client groupings, create application lists and associate these client groupings and lists.

  • Development of a backend API server which responds to a clients query regarding its corresponding application list.

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