Managing Geneva's law courts, from Cobol to Perl

Managing Geneva's Département
Office

Law courts

YAPC.:EU:::2009, Lisbon

laurent.dami@justice.ge.ch

Département
Office

DIRECTION DES SYSTÈMES D'INFORMATION (DSI)
Gestion des procédures judiciaires

01.08.2009 - Page 1

Corporate Perl

• a testimony :
– important project (budget, resources, duration)
– at the heart of the business (mission-critical)
– hundreds of users (soon thousands of users)
• agenda
– business context, mission
– history, project context and organization
– architecture overview
– remarks, conclusion


01.08.2009 - Page 2

Département
Office

Le Pouvoir judiciaire genevois

Geneva's law courts


01.08.2009 - Page 1

Geneva : one of 26 Swiss cantons

• 15,88 km2
• 450'000 inhabitants
(2nd Swiss agglomeration)
• assets 2008 : 17'912 M CHF
• expenses 2008 : 7'738 M CHF

1 CHF = 0.659 EUR = 0.917 USD


01.08.2009 - Page 4

Geneva's law courts
CH: 16.5
FR : 11.9
• 37 courts (grouped in same location) IT : 11.0
LU: 36.8
• 95 permanent judges (21 / 100'000 ha)
• 156 other judges (assisting, replacing)
• 346 juges prud'hommes
• 410 employees
• expenses 105 M CHF (1.26% of global Geneva budget)

For info CH: 101
FR : 76
• 1'598 lawyers (355 / 100'000 ha) IT: 290
LU: 288
source: CEPEJ


01.08.2009 - Page 5

Judicial authorities

Forbidden behaviors Litigations between privates Appeal against decisions
(contracts, family, etc.) by State administration

Penal Civil Administrative
Domain Domain Domain
International

Federal instance

2nd cantonal
instance
1st cantonal
instance

Les juridictions civiles
Conciliation
Chambre de Bureau de Commission de
Justice de conciliation conciliation et conciliation en
paix commission matière de baux
TPI pour l'égalité et loyers
entre hommes et
< 8'000F > 8'000F
femmes

Concilié / Non concilié
jugement
Juridictions de jugement de 1ère instance
Tribunal de
Justice Tribunal Justice Tribunal des Tribunal des
première
de Paix tutélaire de Paix Prud'hommes baux et loyers
instance

Dernière instance : Cour de justice

Chambres Autorité de Autorité de Cour d'appel Chambre
civiles surveillance surveillance des d'appel des
Prud'hommes baux et loyers

Ordinaires
Mesures tutélaires et de protection de l'enfant Baux et loyers
Succession Travail

Laws
Penal Civil Administrative
Domain Domain Domain
International Traités internationaux
agreements

Federal Code pénal Code civil Lois fédérales

Loi de procédure Loi de procédure

2010 2010
Cantonal Lois cantonales
decisions
Loi de procédure Loi de procédure Loi de procédure

Loi d'organisation des tribunaux


01.08.2009 - Page 8

Some figures

Annual statistics of courts activities in 2008

Pénales Civiles Admin. Divers Totaux
Initial cases 6'812 24'998 4'621 22'057 58'488
New cases 23'624 36'833 5'003 13'314 78'774
Total 30'436 61'831 9'624 35'371 137'262
Closed 24'317 38'867 5'021 9'095 77'300
Remaining cases 6'119 22'964 4'603 26'276 59'962
Exit rate 1.03 1.06 1.00 0.68 0.98

Other figures (2006)
• More than 200’000 people summoned (more than 1'000 / day)
• 7'790'500 pages copied
• 406'668 mails (paper)
• 44,7 tons of recuperated paper

01.08.2009 - Page 9

Information systems for Swiss courts

• 1st wave around 1980-85 : single applications
– Tribunal fédéral, Genève, Zurich, Vaud
• years 1990s : 2 vendors take the rest of the market
– client-server (Windows)
– moving towards 3-tiers architecture
– each court as a closed, independent entity

• 2005 : Geneva evaluates both vendors and decides not to take them
– regression in functionalities
– complexity of data migration (different models)
– global switch very risky


01.08.2009 - Page 10

Département
Office

Projects i-JUGE + Justice 2010


01.08.2009 - Page 1

Main use cases
Case registration

Procedural acts Employee

Mails <<actor>>
Office applic.
Judge
Hearings

Financial management
<<actor>>
<<actor>> Jurisprudence Case
Archived management
judgements Judgement writing
<<actor>>
Notifying and closing Accounting
<<actor>>
phrase libraries Archives

Statistics, reporting Administrator

History and future

• 1985: information system (Cobol + "All-in-1" office suite)
• 2002: 1st Perl applications (statistics, Web reporting)
• 2004: 1st major business application in Perl (judgements archive)
• 2005: vendor analysis, decision to rewrite the business application
• 2006: prototype "proof-of-concept" in Perl/Catalyst
• 2007: call for tenders
• 2008: development, stepwise introduction
• 2010: parameterizing new laws
• 2011: electronic data exchange
• 2013: database migration
• 2014: office migration


01.08.2009 - Page 13

Goals

• replace old applications, obsolete
– office (DEC All-in-1)
– business application (VMS / Cobol / DBMS Basis+)
• groupware
• electronic data exchange, open towards external partners
• adapt to important changes in law and organization


01.08.2009 - Page 14

Principles

• Stepwise migration
– functionality chunks
– old and new application live side-by-side on same database
• Web Application
– inter-application links
– desktop/office integration
• Optimize user efficiency
– special care for keyboard navigation
– DHTML / Ajax
• Sophisticated parameterization example

– 1 single app for various needs of 37 courts


01.08.2009 - Page 15

Resources
Other projects Etat GE
• Budget (pluriannual)
integrated
– i-JUGE : CHF 7'650'000 accounting : 100 MCHF
– Justice 2010 : CHF 4'140'000
human
resources : 60 MCHF
• People
– Strategic management : 8p.
– Operational management : 5p.
– Help desk, support, teaching : 6p.
– Analysis : 3p.
– Development & maintenance : 7p.
– Parameterizing, document production, Cobol maintenance : 2p.
– DBA, systems, exploitation : 5p.


01.08.2009 - Page 16

Département
Office

Technical aspects


01.08.2009 - Page 1

Why Perl ?
• positive experiences on former, less critical applications
• expressive power, concision
– ( but not cryptic ! )
• productivity through available components (CPAN)
– Template
– Catalyst
• modularity and abstraction mechanisms
– multiparadigms ( imperative, object-oriented, functional )
• dynamic language Old app
– no compilation phase • core in Cobol
– dynamic loading of components • scripts in "PRC"

– dynamic class / method creation


01.08.2009 - Page 18

Main components
GE::J::Action DM-Web

GE::J::ObjetMetier GE::J::Data::Config GE::J::Autorisation

Catalyst

Data::Domain Template

DBIx::DataModel JSON

DBI Alien::GvaScript

DBD::JDBC YAML prototype.js


01.08.2009 - Page 19

Metrics
Module Files Sub Lines
Data 42 262 16286
ObjetMetier 60 742 25158
Action 13 53 3739
Autorisation 15 30 2579
Directory 14 25 952
MainConfig 4 15 464
DM Web 121 727 21054
tt2/js 280 12213
Total 549 1854 82445
DBIx::DM 19 142 5575
Data::Domain 13 92 4949
GvaScript 18 5591
Total 599 2088 98560

01.08.2009 - Page 20

Tools
• Editors • Tasks
– Emacs – Request Tracker (RT)
– Vim
• Groupware
• Sources – Twiki
– subversion
– Tortoise • Tests
– Test::Harness / Test::More
• Documentation – [ Selenium ]
– Pod + Pod::POM::Web
• Quality
• Distributions – [ Perl::Critic ]
– mini-CPAN
• Searching
• Directives – ack
– Perl Best Practices (D. Conway)
– project guidelines (GE::Justice::Guidelines)


01.08.2009 - Page 21

Département
Office

Conclusions


01.08.2009 - Page 1

Positive

• Perl
– never any technological problem
– code clear and concise (mostly)
– good suite of tools
– productivity
– internal resistance disappeared


01.08.2009 - Page 23

Negative

• sometimes hard to recruit
– (but not impossible)
– some consultants refused to do any Perl ("would stain their CV" !)
– no Perl teaching in schools and universities
• heavy parameterization hard to test
– combinatorics, many possible cases
– complex data sets
• technical problems
– still some install difficulties on Win32
– no native Perl driver for our DBMS; JDBC too slow


01.08.2009 - Page 24

Managing Geneva's law courts, from Cobol to Perl

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