Java Software Systems Development, Recruitment and Consultancy

Summary of some recent in-house projects

Java without the Palaver

Humraz Ltd

Design and implementation of Lowest Unique Bid Auction site. The system was written using our Proteus2 framework. For more details see the P2 case study.

AI Corporation

Design and implementation of 3dsecure processing and transaction processing solution. The system was written using our Proteus2 framework.

Transaction Processing Solutions

Design and implementation of a financial fraud detection system. The system was written using our Proteus2 framework, Hibernate and IBM's Cloudscape (Apache Derby) embedded database. It uses a variety of statistical techniques that are particular good when dealing with the sparse data associated with rare-events. As well as the core functionality we designed sub-systems for authentication, secure XML messaging, data abstraction and the interface. The browser-based interface was defined in XSL which could be rendered to HTML or WML and AJAX principles to provide real-time updates. The system incorporates a pattern-recognition sub-system that we designed. Patterns are defined by mathematical expressions that must are parsed and optimised to be fast. The project also included a GIS sub-system which we wrote using the OpenMap library and the VMAP (Vector World Map) aka DCW (Digital Chart Of The World) data. The system was written using Java 5 and made extensive use of the new language features and threading library. It is highly concurrent, scalable and designed to deal with multiple users and very high transaction rates.

The Healthcare Company

Design and implementation of an intranet web application for a Pathology Lab.
This system allows medical doctors access to pathology test results. The data is very sensitive and hence all access is logged and strictly controlled using HTTP Authentication, SSL and PGP encryption of e-mail. Out-of-range results are flagged and a bleeper and SMS messages sent. All data are presented as XML and transformed using XSLT to HTML or WML depending on user-agent so that the site is accessible via a PC and WAP-enabled phone. The data is held on a SQL Server 7 database and is accessed via Hibernate.

The Box

Design and implementation of an Interaction Server for a Digital Televison Channel. This takes input via IP sockets from: the Internet, touch-tone phone server and set-top-box. It allowed a user to select music videos for playout. The video was scheduled for playout according to various criteria which could be fed to the system via XML scripts. The Interaction Server was built using J2EE on JBOSS with Struts and Hibernate.

Independent Economic Analysts (IDEA)

Just some of the many tasks we have undertaken for IDEA as consultants:

	Development and maintenance of a market-data distribution system using server-push techniques and AJAX.
	Set up a prototype of an IP multicast system using Cisco router. Also, we wrote an evaluation of push servers (Marimba, Pointcast, BackWeb and Slingshot).
	Set up a proxy server to provide HTTP tunnelling of an in-house proprietary protocol. This allowed for Gauntlet firewall login and persistent HTTP/1.1 connections. (VC++)
	Also provided TibCo/Rendezvous tunnelling.
	Interface to WorldPay for online credit-card validation and authorisation.
	Setting up of Apache-SSL web sever, SendMail, Bind, etc on Linux Rehat. SSL certification using SSleay.
	Implementation of Intranet site (using Apache and JBOSS) and public web sites to company requirement.
	Provide integration of web sites into corporate information publishing processes.
	Set up of search engine (htdig) to index company sites and global sites with PDF file parsing and display. Integration into permissioning system (perl 5)
	Creation of corporate business database MS SQL Server with remote access and stored procedures for the more complex tasks.
	Gateway service to facilitate efficient access to MS SQL Server from Unix environment.
	Creation of permissioning system to control web access by product, free-trial period, payments received.
	Creation of a variety of TickerTape applets for Intranet and Internet
	Development and implementation of fault-tolerant, high-availability network strategy and DNS based round-robin load balancing for web-server farm. Also included company wide network and data security requirements.

Deutsche Asset Management

Design and implementation of an Intranet for the distribution of documentation and software. It consisted of several servers and a user population of several thousand with a range of client machines running AIX, Solaris, Windows 95 and NT. To allow a user to select software libraries for download we designed a system that would download software and automatically install the software and set up environment variables, registry keys, ini files and directories on the client's machine. Installation logs were returned to the server. Publication of technical documentation was done using Adobe's PDF files in conjunction with their plugin. Distribution and installation of this plugin was automated. Document publication and management systems were implemented. A centralised security system was developed that authorised access to certain areas of each server, as well as individual documents, by referring to user-permissions held in a database. A Lucene-based application was developed to provide search facilities across the servers.

Java Development, Recruitment and Consultancy