Best known for its grassroots environmental protection activities, the Sierra Club also helps thousands of members get outdoors each year with trips that span the globe. Sierra Club has offered these worldwide adventures for more than a century, but in recent years its IT team has focused on streamlining the trip-reservation process by enabling members to sign up online.

With the club's database growing to more than 3 million members and interest in its outings on the rise, the reservation process was becoming increasingly complex. The Sierra Club estimates that about 70% of the 4,000 members who go on club outings each year sign up online. The program brings in some $5 million annually, so an efficient, easy-to-use online reservation process was key, says Mark Maslow, who heads up a five-developer team as lead programmer analyst at the Sierra Club in San Francisco.

About two years ago, Maslow and his team began looking for ways to enhance the reservation application without complicating the process for end users. What they settled on was a Java-based application development project rooted in open source products: the Jakarta Struts Web application framework, Hibernate object/relational mapping software for database information storage and retrieval, the Eclipse development environment and the Tomcat Web server.

Maslow needed to tightly link the application with the organization's Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database. The architecture includes a Sybase EAServer application server running on a Dell PowerEdge 1650 that connects via a Gigabit Ethernet LAN to the database, which runs on a Dell PowerEdge 4400.

The Sierra Club development team had used Sybase database tools in the past. "We still use Sybase tools for a lot of things. But for the Web application, it was not flexible enough for our particular needs," Maslow says. "We needed something that was powerful and also something that we could get into and do our own customization the way we wanted to. . . . We didn't want to be limited by the tools."

System complexities

One of the main complexities of the new system is its ability to handle reservations under a single household or membership number, a feature that requires a tight link with the database. With the old system, the Sierra Club had to contact trip participants by telephone to determine to which household they belonged.