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This global banking and financial services group has more than US $66 billion in
assets; over 10,000 employees; and 330 full-service branches, subsidiaries, and representative
offices in North America, Europe, Israel, Australia, and Turkey.
Business opportunity
To address the growing costs and complexities associated with delivering IT services
to the bank's customers and employees, the bank decided to redesign and consolidate
its IT infrastructure, replacing its static peer-to-peer architecture with a service
oriented architecture (SOA) that utilizes an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
The Java-based ESB infrastructure will dramatically simplify the bank's IT system
and the programming interfaces used between its back-end information systems and
more than 1,200 applications and services used to manage customer accounts, monitor
financial transactions, distribute financial information to clients, and provide
real-time data monitoring and alerting with its central database and information
services. The back-end systems include an IBM Mainframe and customer data stored
in DB2 UDB, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, and Teradata databases.
The new architecture will also:
- Improve reliability, sustainability, and availability of the bank's information systems.
- Significantly shorten time-to-deployment of new services and applications in a mixed
environment of Java and .NET platforms.
- Improve control and manageability of the system with a centralized, real-time alerting
and monitoring system as well as on-demand, detailed activity and failure reports.
Service oriented architecture
The bank's architects designed a Java-based Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solution
to facilitate the communication between the bank's applications and its back-end
services.
The solution uses IBM's WebSphere Business Integration Server (WBI) to control the
workflow and to implement and manage the communication between the applications
and the back-end systems.
The bank's architects also designed a Service Activation Framework (SAF) component
to provide a centralized set of uniform interfaces that serves as a gateway into
the ESB.
Integrating .NET applications and .NET developerse
Implemented in Java, the SAF interfaces are easily accessible to the bank's Java
applications. However, with more than one hundred in-house .NET developers and several
hundred .NET applications, the infrastructure team needed a fast, effective way
to expose the SAF component to their .NET developers.
The infrastructure team considered exposing the SAF interface to our .NET applications
via Java implemented Web services. However, they found the Web services approach
to be too rigid to meet their needs. They were unable to implement the interaction
between our applications and the SAF services within a stateless protocol.
The team also considered writing a .NET version of the SAF gateway from scratch.
However, the need to maintain two separate code bases introduced an unacceptable
amount of risk.
Instead, the bank's .NET design team decided to use Mainsoft, Enterprise Edition,
to expose the Java-based SAF interfaces through .NET Remoting. The .NET Remoting
client-side components were developed with Visual Studio, as standard .NET components.
The team implemented the Remoting server-side components using Visual Studio and
Mainsoft, taking advantage of its Add Java Reference feature. This allowed them
to directly call the SAF's Java interfaces from their C# code. Next, they used Mainsoft
to cross-compile and deploy the Remoting server-side interface as standard Java
components running natively on WebSphere Application Server, alongside the SAF system.
Solution
Within 5 months, the team set up a production system that automatically scans the
SAF Java interfaces and generates the .NET Remoting code for both the server and
the client side components. Using Mainsoft's Enterprise Edition, the system compiles
and deploys the server-side components on the WebSphere Application Server, while
the corresponding .NET client-side components are distributed to the.NET development
groups.
Meanwhile, the Java developers developed the integrated SAF system in Java, without
having to worry about making their interfaces available to the .NET development
team.
Conclusion
Mainsoft, Enterprise Edition, enabled the bank to extend its service oriented architecture
to the .NET teams and applications, effectively bridging between all client applications
and all services, regardless of their underlying technology foundation.
Today, there are over 1,200 .NET and Java-based applications and services that
are integrated into the bank's SOA infrastructure, and are now in production.
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