Lodestar

In January 2009 Accenture approached us to provide a short training course on developing within the Lodestar ASP framework.

We provided a couple of days additional support for the more difficult pieces of work in January, all remotely via a VPN.

Later in April, Accenture approached us again to provide a full-time developer to work on the project site in Brussels. Our developers are specialists in Lodestar development, and we have been working hard during the systems integration and test phase to deliver the client's requirements. The project has now been completed and is live.

In April 2009, EDF Energy's Lodestar implementation moved into "Business As Usual". From then on, any issues became production support issues dealt with by an EDF support team.

The project has been tuned for EDF and is capable of pricing over 50,000 sites per day to generate energy prices for EDF's largest customers.

During the hand-over period, Geode was involved in troubleshooting issues such as fast track problems. These were investigated, and if there was an underlying problem, we suggested a fix by documenting the problem itself together with the changes needed.

In March 2008 EDF Energy asked us to help with performance tuning their production database. We were able to identify where in the code the poor performing queries were defined, and to develop more efficient versions of them using the Oracle plan tables (explain plan) to reduce overall cost, physical I/O and ultimately time taken to execute.

During autumn 2007 we were involved in ASP training for the Lodestar framework. Many aspects of the ASP framework were covered, with best practices, including stored queries, dictionaries, custom screens, tabs, dropdown actions, XML data, XSLT transforms, debugging and more!

End clients are keen to make use of the Lodestar applications, and see the flexibility the software provides. Custom ASP work should "fit in" with the framework, and we have successfully trained staff in the best way to go about developing for Lodestar.

Geode Software has been working for Oracle Utilities on a number of projects in the UK and now supplies a number of ASP developers to work on site. We worked to extend their web application to provide a detailed breakdown of all the costs involved in a gas supply contract. The web pages were written in Javascript ASP, linked to an Oracle (10g) database and the Lodestar framework. XML technologies were used heavily to manipulate the data for display.

LODESTAR's PricingExpert was customised in order to satisfy the requirements of a large energy company. Geode Software was invited to join it in order to extend their web application by providing additional screens and database functionality. The web pages were written in Javascript, linked to an Oracle (9i) database and the LODESTAR COM object framework.