History of iBizSim
The earliest version of the series of business simulations that has now culminated in iBizSim was developed more than 30 years back. Two aspects were important right from the very beginning. First, the business simulation had to be focussed on international business. Second, the software environment and tools used for developing and deploying iBizSim had to be independent of hardware and operating system constraints. This second requirement was met by using the standard programming language of those days, Cobol, and the deployment was on mainframe computers that only had batch processing capabilities.
The second generation of iBizSim resulted when a database system was incorporated as the back-end process of the business simulation. A proprietary 4th generation language and its database, Progress, were selected because of its hardware and operating system independence. The use of the back-end database enabled the separation of the data model from the presentation and calculation logic, and hence it was possible to develop, modify and maintain different data models without involving any programming effort. The availibilty of on-line, multi-user operating systems allowed the iBizSim users to interact directly with the application, enter their decisions and display their reports on their own.
The current version of iBizSim is a client-server implementation on the internet. This enables users from any location in the world to access the application. The implementation uses a three-tier structure. The back end is a database server (PostgreSQL), the front end is any standard web client or browser (MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox) and the application server in the middle is a standard web server (Apache with PHP). The database and applications servers are deployed under the operating system Linux. Thus only open-source tools and operating systems are used in the development and deployment. This results in a substantial reduction of the costs for the end users.
