Case Study / Ratings & risks management and reporting system
Customer: major US rating agency
Description: the customer presented a problem of reorganization and improvement of the existing system of rating, risks, fees and stock creation, editing and analyzing and managing a big amount of information concerning these entities. The existing application was written with C++ using client-server architecture and had a number of disadvantages, that had caused application reconstruction. The main feature of the existing systems was overloading of working screen applications with information fields, which made them unattractive and inconvenient for users. The customer’s wish was realization of a new web system using J2EE technology. Existing huge data bases were supposed to be collected in a system and work in one complex. Moreover the presence of the customer’s extra application systems called for integration with them to provide the general access to all the data. Planned integration with internal systems was suggested to be done by several ways, such as integration of the data base, application system remote interface activation and integration using web service communications. The customer specially emphasized generation of different reports, as the main business of this customer was information processing.
Solution: After deep analyzing of the customer’s business, Concept Soft not only described the whole data process in the system, but managed to create a distributed application corresponding to all the customer’s requirements. The main feature of the project realization was screen applications unloading for maximally convenient data management and saving full functionality of each system screens. As the customer’s business is distributed and is situated in different geographic locations and the developed project is oriented at any location, it was decided to divide all related data for each of them and create a possibility of editing such data through the application. Moreover high company’s internal safety, strict staff functional group and department division lead to realization of users’ roles in the system, and user’s groups with concrete levels of access to the data as well as to realization of functional departments, each of which had its own data and business rules.
The data flow in the system was realized by multiple steps, at each step the data was supposed to be analyzed by the system and certain users and transferred further according to the rules of work flow or back for additional processing. Each of the data processing steps has its own set of rules and limitations that are different for each segment and department.
The main feature pf the project was narrow integration with different external systems at each data processing step. The importance of the processed information left Concept Soft no chance but create a 100% non-crash system where if there is any deviation or error either external or internal the system must work without any data loss.
The customer had strict technical and speed requirements for the report realization. Thus report generation was in the following formats: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF. The speed limitation for any report generation was one minute, whereas the size of the data used for the report generation was measured by gigabytes. Thorough developers’ and optimizators’ work helped reduce the time of all reports to 20 seconds.
Moreover the customer’s view of the data editor system was similar to Microsoft Excel, where most of data is presented in table format and where a user can change any of it really quickly. To realize this functionality Ext JS component was taken as a base and was adapted according to the project’s requirements. High level of this component use made it possible to manage the data in a convenient way, and Ext JS adapting to Ajax excluded necessity of page reloading and made it possible to edit data really quickly.
Technical description: For this product realization there were used the most modern J2EE technologies and frameworks. To optimize inquiries for report generation there was used both progressive PL/SQL coding and all functional features of Oracle 10g. For communication with external systems there were used communication models through web-services, as well as activation functionality of both native (EJB) and remote clients.
Tecnologies: J2EE, EJB, Oracle 10g, Hibernate, Tapestry, Struts, Velocity, Ext JS, Ajax, Axis, RPC, Esheet, POI
Project workload: there were 12 people on the project and its duration was 7 months.
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