You'll Go Loco for Us!
vanderFLY is a fictitious airline that is part of an exercise in the course, Electronic Commerce, offered at Princeton University by the Department of Operations Research & Financial Engineering.
vanderFLY is a fictitious airline. What makes it interesting from the standpoint of a course on electronic commerce is that it is working with the fictitious company The Great DVD to supply its customers with DVD movies that they can watch on their portable DVD players.
vanderFLY supplies gate information to The Great DVD over the Internet. To get this information The Great DVD must register with vanderFLY by making a TCP connection to port 8189 on balmung.princeton.edu and sending the following message:
ADD hostname portnumber
where hostname is the name of the machine at The Great DVD (e.g., store1.gdvd.com) and portnumber is the UDP port that it will listen to for gate information.
vanderFLY will then transmit gate information to hostname at portnumber using a UDP connection. This information will be formated as follows:
vanderFLY flightnumber GATE gatenumber
The course, Electronic Commerce, is about the buying and selling of goods using electronic transaction processing technologies, specifically those technologies that require little or no intervention on the part of the buyer or seller.
The first part of the course is concerned with technologies for electronic commerce (e.g., internet protocols, data and transaction processing). During this part of the course students must complete several exercises, most of which revolve around developing pieces of an e-commerce site for The Great DVD.
The second part of the course is concerned with economic and financial aspects of electronic commerce (e.g., supply chain issues, risk, and internet pricing).
The third part of the course is concerned with case-studies.
You might think that the name vanderFLY is somehow related to Prof. Robert Vanderbei. Well, you're right.
You might also think that the slogan "You'll Go Loco for Us!" is somehow related to his optimization package called LOQO. That seems pretty farfetched.