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Banking specific Internet/Intranet system for advanced data analysis. Developed in 2002 for a major Swiss bank.
One of major Swiss banks has a large infrastructure of branches placed anywhere in country. The distance between their physical location creates certain difficulties in communication between its financial managers.
In 2002 Scand Ltd. became a subcontractor of a medium-size Swiss company, working for the bank, to develop a solution, that allows bank's employees to easily generate custom financial reports on basis of data located on bank's central servers (running Oracle and SAP software).
While deciding on platform we should use, we generally were trying to choose between two major alternatives: a standard (for that time) client-server solution, where a custom Win32 client application communicates through some network protocol with its server application running on central servers, and a Web-based solution. The second alternative seemed for us a much better idea, because it immediately, already from its basic concept, wiped out the problem with versions updates, installations, and debugging, which are usually necessary for standard multi-tier Windows based solutions.
We've chosen Web-based application. As a server-side scripting engine we decided for Java. But here was a slight problem: JSP wasn't developed as well as it is now, servlets are not comfortable for rapid development, because they require compilation every time developer changes the code.
As a result, we developed an own similar to JSP solution, which provided the same features, that JSP (TomCat) offers now. It had all basic classes for comfortable work in Internet-specific development environment, such as Application, Session, and also a set of additional classes such as Scheduler (for running of some tasks on periodical basis), Logger (writing certain debugging events into database), Mailer and some others.
To simplify usage of the application, we wrote its client-side in almost pure HTML, except of navigational tree (Jtree). Many branches still had Win16 platform, so we had to satisfy the requirement of compatibility for client-side code with Netscape and Explorer versions 3.
The data is taken from Oracle database. The navigational tree on the left side shows different branches and types of documents that user can select to be displayed on the right side. All the documents based on templates. These templates can be manually edited with FrontPage (for administrators only), so financial managers can easily adapt reports to their specific needs. When user selects some parent node in the navigational tree, server performs aggregation of data available for node's child items and generate necessary report in the same way as it does for basic documents. Data can be analyzed by time and by amount, multicurrency (which is important requirement for Swiss) is supported. Generated reports can be printed as well as from generated HTML, where all necessary sizes are strongly specified in pixels, so also can be saved as PDF documents.
Right away after we released the project, it was installed in the bank and won greatest reputation for our client. For that time, technologies that we chosen, were just starting to be popular.
Used tools and technologies:
User Interface: HTML, DHTML, JavaScript and Java applets
Server-side: servlets, Jasper, JDBC
Web-servers: Netscape Enterprise Server 3.5, Apache 1.3 (with mod_jserv)
Database: Oracle 8i
OS: Windows NT 4.0, Solaris 7
Time spent:
6 developers were working 16 months = 96 man-months.
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