Fitch & Mather Stocks: Start Here

Scott Stanfield
Vertigo Software, Inc.

July 1999

What Is FMStocks?

FMStocks is a Web application commissioned by Microsoft and developed by Vertigo Software, Inc. as part of a Windows Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA) performance and scalability study. The National Software Testing Laboratories Inc. (NSTL) performed extensive benchmarking on this Windows DNA reference application with results posted on the Visual Studio Scalability Center, located at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/scale/.

This set of documents serves to illustrate the architecture and design principles surrounding a high-performance Web application. It was built using the following tools and technologies:

• The Microsoft® Visual Studio® development system
  • The Visual Basic® development system 6.0
    
    
  • Visual InterDev® Web development system 6.0
    
    
  • ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) 2.1
• Microsoft Windows NT® Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition
  • Internet Information Server 4.0 and Active Server Pages
    
    
  • Microsoft Transaction Server
    
    
  • Windows NT Load Balancing Service
• Microsoft SQL Server™ 7.0 Standard Edition

The FM in FMStocks is Fitch & Mather, a fictional company first introduced by Microsoft in 1998 as a company to hang sample applications from. We extended the long list of sample programs offered by F&M by developing a sandbox stock trading application using the Windows DNA model.

Documentation List

Besides reading and installing the application on your own system, the following documentation list serves as a roadmap to the FMStocks application. We suggest reading the documents in the following order:

• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Setup Documentation. Describes in detail the seven easy steps you need to follow in order to set up the FMStocks Web application on your own computers. You can also visit http://www.fmstocks.com/ for a live version of the site and the latest errata and bug fixes.
  
  
• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Database. Discusses the logical and physical schemas, stored procedures, and triggers used to build a functional database to buy and sell stocks.
  
  
• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Data Access Layer. The Data Access Layer (DAL) insulates the business logic from the database, providing a single-entry point to the database. It contains a ton of useful ADO tips and tricks.
  
  
• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Data Access Layer for Oracle 8. We ported the original DAL to an Oracle 8 implementation. This document shows how we did it. Most of the work consisted of migrating the stored procedures to parameterized SQL queries, embedded in this DLL.
  
  
• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Business Logic Layer. The Business Logic Layer uses different DAL features to build a functional Web trading system. It supports high-level features like buying and selling stocks and managing accounts.
  
  
• Fitch & Mather Stocks: Web Application Design. Everything comes together in our small-scale ASP site. Some of the guiding design principals stem from our earlier work on the Fitch & Mather Expense Reporting System.

About the Author

Scott Stanfield is the president of Vertigo Software, Inc. Vertigo Software is a San Francisco Bay Area-based consulting firm that specializes in the design and development of Windows Distributed interNet Architecture (DNA) applications and components. He can be reached at scott@vertigosoftware.com or on the Web at http://www.vertigosoftware.com/.