The Scope story: everything stays different
Explore the origins of Scope. Our multi-part blog series reveals the development of the digital Standard for logistics. All chapters at glance:
- The Dawn of a New Era
- An Idea Takes Flight
- Times Are Changing
- Everything Stays Different
- Not Yet Perfect, But Promising
- One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
- And Yet It Moves
everything stays different
Reinventing ProCarS? JR wasn’t exactly over the moon at first, but his son’s passion won him over. The two founders had managed their company prudently over the years, ensuring its solid financial position. This made it possible to fund the redevelopment project independently – without relying on banks or investors who, more likely than not, would have interfered with the process, to the detriment of the development. Even without outside involvement, the challenges ahead were considerable. And the journey to what would later become Scope was still a long one.
Around 1998, Christian Riege made the decision to rebuild ProCarS from the ground up. At that time, he had no way of knowing that it would take ten years and several false starts to reach the goal. In hindsight, this ignorance was perhaps a blessing; had he known the challenges ahead, he and his team might never have embarked on the project that eventually became Scope. But before development could begin, a critical question loomed: what would be the best technology for such an ambitious undertaking?
To outsiders, the technological considerations probably sounded like encrypted jargon: 4GL programming, XMLHttpRequest, EJB, JBoss, GridBagLayout – to name just a few. Non-developers often can’t grasp the complexity developers face when evaluating so many options and deciding on the right path forward. Trial and error is inevitable, even for experts.
At the time, developing the entire system in a web browser seemed unsuitable to Christian Riege. Browser-based applications were form-oriented rather than field-oriented, which would have been a significant step backward – especially since ProCarS had been field-oriented from the very beginning, a groundbreaking feature in the late 1970s.
After the turn of the millennium and numerous technological experiments, a glimmer of hope appeared. Java was emerging as the programming language of the future – or at least as a critical player in the landscape. Java’s platform independence made it particularly appealing to Christian Riege. This opened the door to conceptualizing a three-tier software architecture: a client communicating with a server, which in turn managed data in a database. It sounded promising. However, it soon became clear that Christian Riege’s expectations, given the state of technology at the time, were overly optimistic.