Creating a real-time customer account tracking service was no mean
feat for First-e, says Danny Bradbury
Components and objects are the name of the game when it comes to
Internet banking, judging by an announcement made last week.
First-e, an Internet bank set up last October, has signed a deal
with Borland/Inprise to purchase its Visibroker object request
broker as the basis for a real-time customer account tracking
service.
The bank had been using the Twister product from Brokat to
handle the connection of front-end Internet services to its
back-end systems.
First-e, which has operated as a simple money
repository guaranteeing high interest rates, will launch a current
account and online share dealing service this month.
Shane Colclough, chief technical officer at the company,
explains that moving to this model has drastically increased
First-e's technical requirements. "We have a concept of buying
power, so that people with money in the bank can spend that money
on shares," he says. "When someone goes up to an ATM and puts in
their card, we have to know in real time how much money they can
withdraw. IT is complicated by the fact that people are using money
to do trading online."
First-e currently uses an Oracle 8 database connected to a disc
array. It uses a Sun Microsystem cluster at the back end to handle
transaction processing. Although many object-oriented database
companies are advocating the use of object data storagefor
Web-based e-commerce applications, Dirk Marzlus, development
manager with Factor-e, the outsourcing partofthe groupproviding
back-end services to First-e, explains that this was not an option
for the bank.
True, the event-driven nature of e-commerce applications makes
object storage an attractive proposition, but First-e had too much
existing investment in the Oracle product. It does all of its
database reporting using Oracle, and this can be hard to change,
especially given the Oracle skills it has built up in-house.
Instead, the bank uses the object-relational mapping
capabilities within Oracle 8. This sort of attitude will doubtless
be one of the biggest hurdles for small object database management
system companies such as Versant, which are trying to persuade
customers to take the fully object-oriented route.
While it is using Java as a programming language for some of its
back-end code, First-e is also wary of using the server-based
component framework Enterprise Javabeans (EJB) as a basis for its
performance-critical applications, explains Marzlus.
"Most of the EJB services don't scale that well, so we only use
it in non-critical components," he says. This is the reason he
chose the Corba object model as the basis for the critical buying
power component.
WhileCOM+from Microsoft and Sun's EJB are both attracting lots
of interest in the server-based e-commerce application space, for
mission- critical applications such as banking, the more complex
but more established Corba object framework is a no-brainer.
It seems that Sun still has some work to do convincing higher
end customers that its server technology can fulfil all its
promises.
- In another Internet banking deal, Abbey National signed with
middleware company BEA Systems to use its Tuxedo messaging product
as the basis for integration between its legacy and middle-tier
systems.
The Tuxedo product is part of BEA's Ecommerce Transaction
Platform, which also includes an object request broker and an
Enterprise Javabeans broker. Abbey National has pledged to use
component-based development techniques for future e-commerce
applications.