The project has accomplished just what its name implies: access to over 25 million court records to anyone with a computer, a modem and a Java-enabled Web browser. It provides search capabilities and access to all filed court documents, case histories and both attorneys' and judges' calendars. Providing the first online, realtime access to court records in the nation, it has cut down on trips to the courthouse for lawyers and the public and was developed for about $10,000. While designing and implementing the system provided challenges, it came about in a surprisingly short period of time -- about four months from conception to the first working pilot -- and has proved immensely popular. Its first day online, in January, the Maricopa Web site received about 4,000 visitors (or "hits"); that number has since nearly doubled to an average of 7,500 hits a day.
"We knew this was going to be popular with the media and the legal profession, but what we weren't prepared for was that our largest number of users would be commercial; the business community has really embraced the system. Right behind them are individuals who use it for everything from following cases they are involved in to adopting it as an electronic Better Business Bureau," said Mike O'hara, director of judicial services in Maricopa County. "The system is handling about 40,000 inquiries a day, since each hit usually involves multiple queries, and I don't think it will be long before we are managing over 8,000 hits per day."
All Bull
The DPS 9000/532 mainframe in use in Maricopa supports the GCOS 8 operating system -- versions of which have been sold by Bull HN Information Systems since 1978. It is like thousands of others that agencies and businesses are using across the country. Developed long before the Internet was a gleam in the eyes of today's techies, these mainframe systems communicate in the COBOL programming language and display their information on traditional green screens with lines of text.
If a user wishes to search for a case file and types in that query, the computer provides a location code for the general file. Then the user simply has to access -- and input the code in -- another directory. No clever icons and no quick, user-friendly search engines.
While the system supports an internal population of 1,000 and up to 500 users at one time, it can only be accessed by in-house terminals and is an intimidating process to the average public user. Until the Maricopa Web site went up, the court's customers -- lawyers, businesses, the media and the public -- stood in line for their turn to use one of a dozen terminals in the court's basement records room. A five-minute time limit is enforced for each user, adding pressure on a novice user.
"As the Web server came in vogue, around 1994, we saw that there was an opportunity there for our existing mainframe customers to have browser access to their mainframes. We realized that it would be unrealistic to replace the existing systems, and we wanted to figure out ways to interoperate the GCOS mainframes with browsers, PCs and small UNIX systems," explained Dwight Ogelsby, Bull's director of product marketing. The company describes the software for accomplishing these goals as interoperability products. Specifically, the software developed for Maricopa is Enterpriser Services Procedures (ESP) 8, though custom code must be written for each agency application. "Many of our customers have millions of dollars invested in their mainframe code; they couldn't afford to rewrite it from scratch to Web enable it. Instead, we have gone back to the mainframe [to] teach it to speak in both its original language and Java," he continued. "This way, we were able to develop the software once, at Maricopa, and make it available to all of our customers."
"We've got 25 million case records out there, and there are tragic stories of agencies trying to transfer an entire mainframe to a client-server system. We didn't want to become another tragic story," added Maricopa's O'hara. "We looked at our situation, talked with Bull, and said, 'We don't want to scrap what we've got and start over. Let's add value to what we've got by Java enabling the mainframe and turning it into a powerful file manager.'"
Printer Jam
The biggest problem they ran into during development involved trying to stay with an early version of the Java language, so that almost anyone could access the site and be able to print.
"A lot of PCs can only access Java 1.02, which is an early version that doesn't allow for a printing option. We also knew most of our customers, especially the public and the media, would need to be able to print the information they looked up," said O'hara. "In order to stay with 1.02, we developed the software so that when you select "print" on your PC, everything in the file is sent back to the Web server, which then formats an HTML page of the data and prints it from your browser. All this happens in seconds."
The other drawback to 1.02 is that it supports only limited graphic capabilities, which explains why Maricopa's Web site isn't as flashy as other Web sites on the Net. However, despite all the work and a few constraints, O'hara said that the process has proved invaluable and is going to provide benefits that go beyond the convenience of the Web site. While this first step has improved public access to the court, it also showed the potential for accessing the mainframe and making the court's intranet as graphically oriented and user-friendly as the public Web page. "Our Internet response times, when a user gives the system a command, is about 12 to 15 seconds, which we are really happy about," said O'hara. "Still, even 12 to 15 seconds would not be acceptable for our internal use, but now we know what can be accomplished, and we know that we can fine tune the process to develop fast intranet use. Right now we are looking to upgrade our performance through improvements to our hardware, like installing new front-end processors and our working toward sub-second internal response times."
However, a graphical user interface for his intranet is not the only thing that has O'hara excited about the technology's potential. "There are a lot of people out there talking about the possibility of electronic filing for all court documents. We can now see that the goal is realizable, and that would be a tremendous boon to the justice system. We have taken the first step, but the potential is amazing."
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