In May 2005, after leaving Schaffner to pursue new career opportunities I joined Trend Controls Systems as a senior software developer. My new roll was jointly developing Trend's 963 Supervisor software as part of team of 4 permanent developers. 963 is a graphical, real-time, user interface for the building control system. It enables the user to monitor plant or building services, and make changes to the way the building is controlled from a graphical display.
The software is developed from a variety of different programming technologies. The main application is developed using Visual Studio 6 (C++ and MFC), although .NET, Java, JavaScript, SQL, XSLT and HTML are also employed.
The 963 Supervisor software provides a main GUI where operators can create graphical schematic pages that represent the plant they monitor and control. Through the use of web technologies, most of the Supervisor functionality is available through web browsers. The main application has an integrated web server that makes this possible.
Java Applets provide a rich web experience for remote users that use the server version of 963 Supervisor. The Eclipse IDE (version 3.1) is used currently used as the authoring tool for the applets.
963 Supervisor employs an SQL database for storing all of its application and live data. This provides a powerful means of accessing data, not only to the 963 Supervisor but to any 3rd party applications that wish to use this data.
Trend has sold well over 10,000 copies of the 963 supervisor and it can be found in some very prestigious buildings around the world.
