Chapter 15 596 Our mission is to design a system that will publish information on these sell-offs in the most economical, timely, and efficient way possible. The diagram below lays out the data flow in the system, and where XML may be used for data interchange. Hundreds of Specialized Travel Agents (distributed locations) Headquarter Database/Application (Centralized Location) Travel Operators, Wholesalers, Distributors, and Airlines (distributed locations) Continous Update of Last Minute Selloffs and Price Reductions Optimized Consolidated Selloffs Update To Buyers Consolidated Selloffs and last minute trip Data XML XML The server in headquarters is mainly a database server, containing an RDBMS that consolidates all the received sell-off specials. There is a desire not to load the server with unnecessary processing since other departments at the headquarters – including the all-important accounting department, also use the very same server. A Quick Analysis The restrictive server platform forces us to consider scenarios where processing is off-loaded from the server, and shared by the client machines. Since most of the agencies have acquired their desktop computers recently, most of them have machines that have computing power and memory to spare. Furthermore, the restrictive budget of the project does not warrant large-scale server-side development and testing. We must keep the server piece of the system relatively simple. Yet, our design must cater for the specialization of the individual travel agents. One design alternative considered is to classify and organize the sell-off information, and then map it to the specialty of each of the travel agencies. Server- side application logic will then customize the delivery of the sell-off information to each connection agency. This approach requires significant database table and query design, as well as server-side programming. It would also definitely exceed the client’s anticipated budget. A large portion of the travel agents are connecting to the headquarters via slow analog modems, and some are on a packet switched network that charges by the data transmitted. Therefore, there is a definite need to optimize on the quantity of data transmitted between the client and server.