Enhancing property rates management using N-TIER architecture: a case study of Kampala City Council

Abstract

Web technology has become the principle platform for electronic commerce, electronic business, and the digital firm because it provides so many benefits. By using Internet technology, organizations can reduce communication and transaction costs, enhance coordination and collaboration, and accelerate the distribution of knowledge (Laudon and Laudon, 2001) [20]. In order to take advantage of the web, many organizations have to redesign their legacy applications into web based applications. This project set out to enhance the management of property tax in Kampala district through the re-design of a 2-tier client server revenue management software into a 3-tier web based application. The purpose of the re-design was to address problems suffered by the 2-tier application including difficulty in software distribution, lack of access to the system by the District’s partners and difficulty in managing scattered databases. The new web based application was to have improved flexibility, performance, ease of software distribution and application scalability. The new application would also have a consolidated database. In the redesigned architecture, the client application only contained the user-interface while the remaining functionality was split across a database and application server. The methodology used included the study of the existing application and its redesign using the unified process (UP) and Unified Modeling Language (UML). The implementation was done using Sun Java Creator which is a Java language integrated development environment(IDE), Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Sun Application Server 9.1. The re-designed proto-type application was tested by the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Unit and users in KCC.