Lynden is a family of transportation and logistics companies specialized in shipping to Alaska [1] and other locations worldwide. Over land, on the water, in the air – or in any combination – Lynden has been helping customers solve transportation problems for over a century.

The Lynden Freight Management System is a NetBeans Platform application [2] which serves a dual purpose as both a planning and freight tracking tool.

• The Planning module allows terminal managers to see all freight that is currently inbound to their location as well as freight that is scheduled to depart from their location so they can make the most efficient use of their dock space and resources as possible.

• The Trace module allows customer service personnel to search for customer account information, view the tracking history of any given freight item in the system as well as display any documents related to the shipment, such as bills of lading or delivery receipts.

NetBeans Platform

Lynden has benefited from the NetBeans Platform as it allows developers to focus on the business logic of our applications rather than the underlying “plumbing”.  We are able to leverage built-in support for event handling, enable/disable functionality on UI controls, dockable windows, and automatic updates for our application with minimal work compared to rolling our own framework.

We chose to go the desktop application route as we have a number of existing desktop applications that this application will need to interface with, as well as a commercial set of rich UI components that we have been using for some time now. For the initial deployment, we will be pushing the application installer out to employees PCs via the Landesk remote desktop administration tool.  Future updates to various modules within the application will be done via the update center functionality built into the NetBeans Platform.

Screenshots