I hope you had a chance to attend some of the recent Synergy DevPartner Conference virtual sessions. There were many opportunities to learn about the latest Synergex technologies and how customers are taking advantage of them. One of the conference themes was the importance of creating RESTful web services with your legacy applications, and the sessions included some examples of customers doing this with our Harmony Core open-source product. We also just published a new customer success story, which describes how our customer RCC used Harmony Core to create a RESTful web service and provide its customer Legacy Vacation Resorts (LVR) with a new web portal.

Used by vacation property owners, the RCC Resort Management Solution offers features such as a central reservations system, contract management, and sales analysis. LVR offers travel experiences across Florida, Colorado, New Jersey, and Nevada. When COVID hit, LVR wanted to make their resorts safer and more comfortable for their guests. They decided to move their check-in process to the web so guests could minimize the time required to interact with LVR’s front desk agents.

RCC and LVR already had a web access solution, but it used Synergex’s proprietary xfServerPlus product, and they both wanted a more standards-based solution. This was a great opportunity for RCC to modernize their solution and provide a foundation for meeting future demands for access.

RCC started with the data/logic access routines they already had for xfServerPlus, expanded them to meet the needs of the new web service and web UI, and then added new OData controllers and a Harmony Core feature called “adapters” to expose the data and logic as OData resources. Code for the adapters and controllers was generated using Synergex’s CodeGen tool and RCC’s Synergy repository.

RCC and LVR were able to meet the project goals, and both are excited to move forward with their new web services solution. See the full success story for details (and some beautiful resort photos).

Mike Amundsen, the Synergy DevPartner Conference’s keynote speaker, said that when you’re getting started with web services and trying to figure out scope and boundaries, you should look for the smallest problem you have, fix that and learn from it, and then move on to the next smallest problem. In the “Leveraging Web Services for UI” conference session, customer Forward Computers had a similar message: start with a well-defined function. (They also advised making sure it’s not too simple, as you’ll want to evaluate performance.) The new customer success story describes how RCC and LVR got started with LVR’s self-check-in function. What function will you start with?

To learn more about web services and Harmony Core, refer to our web services training videos and our documentation.