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Business Challenge
Our customer created a technology to help enterprises integrate heterogeneous data coming from isolated systems
into a company's information structure and produced a product family for data transformation. Emerging web 2.0
technologies offered a new potential for business integration, and our customer decided to use them and to
develop innovative industry-specific software. Business and technological concepts of the application were new
and required regular verification. After end user testing proved the application's feasibility and viability,
software requirements were to be refined for further development. The customer was looking for an outsourced
programming team who could learn new technologies quickly and apply them in real projects effectively.
Solution
Software was developed by a distributed team of in-house and off-shore developers. Axmor was first hired to
program the web interface for transformation process monitoring, and over time our Java EE developers proved
their capability to participate in the development of core server side logic.
The developed software can translate any data - taken from files or coming through any network protocol - and
make them available for internal company software. Our developers built it around SOA principles. The server
has API that can be accessed using the most convenient protocol, including JMS, HTTP, SOAP, JSON-RPC, etc.
AJAX-based Interface
GUI for managing data transformation process was fully developed by Axmor's Java programmers.
On the first step of the project, GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and Apache Tuscany were selected to implement a
cutting-edge AJAX application working without page reload.
The technical strength of the application was its use of the Apache Tuscany Server, which is one of the most
advanced open-source implementations for:
- Service Component Architecture (SCA).
- Service Data Object (SDO).
- Data Access Service (DAS).
The industry new product was learned by Axmor Java EE developers in a short time, and areas for fine-tuning of the
Tuscany server were identified to address all of customer's needs. Along with other changes, the properly
designed enhancements to the source code improved processing of JMS messages and use of DAS protocol.
Over the course of the project, the customer develops an opinion - the target audience of the data transformation
solution is quite variated and requires a differentiated and more dynamic approach. As a result, the initially
developed software, which resided on open-source Apache Tomcat, was targeted as a cost-effective implementation.
WebSphere Application Server was selected to create a new version of the software primarily aimed at large
corporations. The development was also outsourced to Axmor. The main benefits of the WebSphere-based solution are
load balancing and fault tolerance assuring better performance and 24/7 availability of the software.
Business Logic Development
The web application is used to manage and monitor graphs execution, where graphs are programmed algorithms for
incoming data processing. Axmor's developers offered a solution for software infrastructure, in which graphs
are running, and this solution was accepted by the customer for implementation. In addition to this,
application's business logic was developed by our programmers. The attained mutual understanding and proven
technical expertise of Axmor Java EE developers prompted the customer to outsource the core of the server side
logic to Axmor.
Flexible Authentication Options
Authentication can be performed in two modes: a) A basic mode that requires users to enter login information
each time to access the application; b) NTLM authentication to login the user automatically by checking his
network status.
Custom Business Flow
The first organization to adopt the developed data transformation solution was a large US bank. The bank needed
to process credit cards and transactions coming from other financial institutions. For the data transformation
engine to work in the bank's software environment, Axmor implemented a custom business workflow. In order to
build processes in a short period of time, one of the available options was used - namely IBM WebSphere Process
Server. The bank's workflow was not documented, and models created earlier using another process engine were
used as a specification. The strengths of the developed custom software solution lie in its ability to process
an enormous amount of data and to work reliably without failures.
The scheme below depicts the model of custom implementation of the data transformation solution.
Easy Innovation Outsourcing
One of the project challenges was to deal with foggy requirements - a result of quick innovations and lack of
full understanding of end user needs. These requirements were gathered through experiments, prototyping, and
test demonstrations to end users, and the collected feedback further defined the next steps. Although
consultants do not recommend such unstructured projects for outsourcing, Axmor Java EE developers provided a
flexible environment, in which enhancements were implemented and technical issues were resolved quickly and
without much time spent on technical documentation. Conference calls (twice a week) and emails became an
effective tool to our development team to build software in an agile programming style.
Satisfied with the results and with how the entire development process works, our customer continues to extend
our relationship, using Axmor's developers for the most complex and knowledge-consuming tasks.
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