FINANCE

Case Study: Model for a prototype of a Web site to enable the secure delivery of sophisticated, highly interactive online services to financial organizations(mutual funds).

Objectives of the proposed model.

rapid development and delivery of secure, highly interactive next - generation online services to a large customer base.
higher overall quality of the web site by focusing on improved - security, scalability, flexibility, maintainability, and availability.
prototype new technologies, tools, and standards.

The following case study by aaramb demonstrates the enhanced capabilities of a web site based on a unified architecture that integrates the latest web and distributed object technologies.

The integration of these technologies into web site yields many benefits, including the rapid development of new, advanced interactive services. These next generation services provide financial companies dealing with products like mutual funds, with a significant customer service advantage over its competitors. Other benefits include enhanced security, accessibility, performance, scalability, maintainability, extensibility, and reuse of the web site infrastructure and applications. Finally, an open, distributed object-oriented approach taken by a interactive content delivery architecture lead to a system that allows future introduction and substitution of new, improved infrastructure components and technologies as they become available either through development or purchase. This helps lower the overall cost and time of development, while increasing flexibility.

The architectural model is built across n-tiers. Each distinct tier is responsible for providing a specific category of service, enforcing a "separation of concerns" in the system.

Tier 1, Clients: This tier accommodates the architecture’s client, which employs a TCP/IP (IIOP/HTTP/HTTPS) protocol to communicate with either Tier 2 or Tier 3.

Tier 2, Security/Proxies: This tier acts as an Internet "firewall," shielding subsequent tiers from unauthorized communication requests.

Tier 3, Web Server Interfaces: This tier consists of the HTTP/Web server and associated Gateway Interface Applications. These Gateway Interface Applications acts as the intermediary to Application Servers residing in Tier 4.

Tier 4, Application Server(s): This tier makes available one or more application servers. An application server applies functional business logic to the processing of a request, utilizing the services of Tier 5 as necessary.

Tier 5, Application and System Services: This tier provides a set of common abstract services to the Application Servers of Tier 4.

A Tier 5 service is either an Application Service, which represents functionality that has been factored out of Tier 4 applications or a System Service.

A system service typically provides common infrastructure services that are utilized by all components of the system. Tier 5 services usually integrate with or "wrap" legacy systems that reside in Tier 6.

Tier 6, Legacy and External Systems: Systems in Tier 6 would typically be enterprise data stores or enterprise class centralized systems (for example, mainframe) that implement critical line-of-business functionality.