Antunes CS page

Programming Portfolio

(updated January 2003)

Introduction

I have been writing programs for the company I co-founded since 1991. The languages I have been using so far to accomplish this are: C, Pascal, Object Pascal, PHP scripting and Java. I am including detailed information, in reversed chronological order, of all the software and their specifications bellow for your analysis.

E-mail Database Java verifier (2002-2003)

This is an application writen in Java that verifies emails address from a SQL database. It uses JNDI classes to do MX hosts lookups. After that, it uses socket programming to issue SMTP commands and verify responses. Depending on the response the Database entry is updated accordinly.In order to accomplish this project, a Professor Lee's assignment played a fundamental part on it. This project was first implemented in PHP scripting.

Java E-mail user list (2003)

This is a Java class that sends an HTML journal to a list of users on a SQL database.

Java E-mail retriever (2003)

This is a Java class that was writen to save email attachments from a sendmail server based on the type or extension of the attachment. It later, sends a log messages to the administrator of the attachments receiced, who sent them and when. It is part of a Database automated updating system that is beging constructed in Java to replace one constructed in 1999 using Object Pascal (Delphi).

Dataming for pecas-on-line.com.br (2003)

It is a set of tools to gather information and output reports based on parts inventories (currently arround 60 millions different itens), on queries by users.

E-mail Database PHP verifier (2002)

The same as E-mail Database Java verifier but in PHP instead. PHP does have a smaller footprint than JVM but it does not allow threads like Java does. That's the reason why it was rewriten in Java.

Toyota aftersales e-business solution and warranty claim systems. (1996-Today)

The Toyota e-business solution is a product I have been working, managing and developing since 1996. It is a complete suit of e-business internet based software that has received awards since 1997 and is acknowledge as Toyota's best e-business suit in 146 countries where Toyota has operations. I am including a letter from 1997 given to our company regarding it. The suit is basically divided into: automated online autoparts ordering and follow-up software, integrated nationwide dealers inventory and a warranty claim system. The idea is to have each dealer online with Toyota's headquartes. However it was such a successful case that it was used as a MBA thesis at the University of Sao Paulo business school that was awarded the top grade. I am also including a copy of the acknowledgements sessions of the thesis. When the system was deployed in late 1996 it boosted sales by 30%. Within a year, Toyota was able to do something unique. They have helped each dealer to sell most of their parts inventory and became shipping parts daily and faster than anyone else. Today, a Toyota dealership is the most profitable dealership in Brazil because of such level of automation and integration. At first, the whole system was writen in Pascal and C and used a dialup network. Later I migrated it to Linux, using Apache as web server, 2 SQL servers and I have writen the new software in PHP and Object Pascal. Today, we are replacing the legacy Object Pascal code by Java code. PHP is still used for the user interface because of its footprint and speed. I have also chosen it due to its syntax similarities to C and Java. I have writen a lot of PHP code including a SQL based authentication login system. The CGIs of it are quite complex as they do lots of verifications for the Warranty claim system and the online order system. The warranty claim system has caught both Japanese and Canadian Toyota's executives attention. I have lectured to both parties in a couple of occasions. They were particularly interested on the level of intelligence of the system that did a lot of verification during the warranty claim process thus slashing the error possibilities to almost zero. In fact, that helped to reduce a lot of personnel and speeded the process that took 30 dias to a few hours. I have writen all of the code for those systems. I am also responsible to administer the whole network and servers since Toyota has hired my company infrastructure as well.

Auto parts portal pecas-on-line.com.br (1999-today)

This a a system used by dealers, manufacturers, insurance companies, garages and end customers. The idea is to provide easy and free access to an inventory of millions of parts from many manufacturers spreadeded in an area larger than continental United States. In order to have the database updated, I developed some Delphi/Kylix applications to receive each dealer's inventory file and insert them in the SQL servers in almost real time speed. The automated Delphi applications read each user file, check for its layout information in a SQL table, import the file's records to a parts table, send automated email to the dealer notifying of the success or failture of the operation incluing detaleid information such as the number of itens updated on the database. There is about 40 million itens updated daily. Also, this system gives free access to end users or companies to do parts requests. These requests are sent instantly to about 7.000 companies using 2 sendmail UNIX servers, majordomo mailing lists and software I have designed in PHP. The revenue of pecas-on-line.com.br comes from advertising and Data Mining. Data Mining is the largest source of income and has been designed in a way that manufacturers can have access to strategic marketing information in a matter of minutes instead of days or months that took to consulting companies to do estimates based on unreliable data. Data mining has been a topic I have been studying a lot lately specialy regarding algorithms that can be implemented with Java.

S.E.N. A dial-up EDI network (1991-1995)

S.E.N. Was a dial up EDI network that connected 1,500 auto dealers nationwide in Brazil. It was developed up to 1995 and it remained in use until 1998. The country had no Internet infrastructure and bandwith was expensive and unreliable until 1998. The solution was to offer an alternative within customers' reach: an EDI dial up network.What this meant in practice was: shared inventory and product information including cars catalogs and list price; integration of the Brazilian auto market providing reliable, lower cost and fast information. This was the first of its kind in the world before the web became popular. The project pioneered the concept of auto business -to-business solution. All by myself, I designed the entire suite of software applications: the database, the communication applications, installation, database browser, insertion dialog, configuration applications that could identify modem, adapted sorting algorithms to work with my own database design based on sequential record files. The software was written in Pascal and C compiled with Borland compilers under DOS.The revenue came from monthly fee non-limit usage. Here's a description of the software created for this project.There was an instalation application written in Pascal that Created the necessary directories under the selected destination, decompressed all the packages using the lha libraries, checked the available space on the destination drive, ran the login/account dialog information after installation and ran the modem detection application to configure the communication software. As the Database I used sequential files of Pascal record structures. Created search, insert, delete, browse and sorting functions to implement a full database functionality. The communication application had a redundancy call on demand function, detected carrier lost, resumed file transfer where it was stopped checking if the file was not changed, used Z-Modem file transfer routines, had a full automated script to do the login and desired tasks as previously selected on a menu. The compressing and decompressing routines using lha library and compression algorithms. Everything was transparent to the end user by selecting an option the system prepared the records to be upload in a file, compressed them and uploaded it to the servers after login into it through a dial-up connection.It was an easy to use sysrem.The interface was a set of colored ASCII screens, menus and pop-up windows that although looked great did not required especial hardware and worked just fine with monochromatic monitors. It could also be navigated with a mouse as I have implemented mouse event driven routines. S.E.N. had to be easy to install, easy to operate with intuitive menus for people that have never operated a computer before, fast and could not require special hardware as far as RAM and hard disk space. It could be used with an Intel 286 based PC with 200mb of disk and 640kb of RAM. It had to be reliable as the company did not charge for support and some of the phone lines of those days did not have a good quality. It was a successful endeavor as it had many customers spreadeded over a country with continental dimensions back in the early 1990's when e-business was still new to many companies and a previledge of just bigger corporations. The most interesting part of SEN as a system was that it was the first of its kind in the world. It was similar to Autotrader but all the data input was done through software instead of typing by importing the inventories from each dealer's databases. All this done before the internet was accessible to all.

Business-to-business between Esso-Toyota (1998-2001)

I wrote applications and system to allow lubricant and oil products orders between Toyota and Esso through integration of the Toyota dealers nationwide. It was a b2b solution.

Brazilian Subaru ordering system (1997)

I developed and managed Subaru's e-business ordering system that was deployed through a dial up network. The system included integrated nationwide inventory, ordering and warranty claim.

Smaller administration applications

I have also designed and writen smaller applications such as a win32 ZIP decompresser tool, email list sending application and GUI SQL navigator. Those were applications for my company internal usage.

Other computer science activites I was engaged on:

Published material

• Published in 2000 a complete howto on networking. The howto is available at http://www.antunes.eti.br. It includes basic binary maths, IP networking, routing, firewall concepts, ADSL, VPN and it offered a 1.300 lines firewall script. The article was opened to everyone and helped many schools, government institutions, small and big companies to have access to high speed Internet infrastructure at no cost as far as the technology and knowledge involved. Received about 100.000 page hits from December 2000 to October 2002 and e-mails from many different users, institutions and companies.