Newsletter sign-up

View all newsletters

Sign up for our technology specific newsletters.

Enterprise Java

Email Address:

Banking on Java-based billing

Standards-based open-systems protocol raises groundswell of industry and consumer interest

By Tom Clements, JavaWorld.com, 11/01/99

Page 3 of 7

By adhering to a standards-based open-systems protocol -- called OFX, for Open Financial Exchange -- for the exchange of billing information, Spectrum both opens up and levels off the playing field so that more agencies have more access to more customers. The anticipated net effect is a groundswell in bill payment activity by organizations large, medium, and small.

The interesting -- and unexpected -- thing in all of this is the role Just in Time plays: turns out the company helped to pioneer the OFX bill-presentment protocol. From its inception, it's been a consistent champion of open systems and the use of nonproprietary protocols for Internet billing. There are, in fact, three good reasons for taking a close look at this innovative and egalitarian startup:

• Its leadership in standards-based electronic billing and payments
  
  
• Its open-systems distributed network architecture, based on Java software and XML-compliant interfaces
  
  
• Its presence in an industry whose Internet repercussions -- and ecommerce impact -- are only just beginning to be recognized

We've already covered the first item. The second item should be viewed in the context of distributed network applications, a phrase starting to take hold on the Net. Everybody wants interoperability among apps and objects in heterogeneous network environments. And everybody has their own take on how it should be done, picking and choosing from some mix of CORBA, DCOM, servlets, RMI, server-side JavaScript, EJB, XML, ActiveX, Perl, JSP, and so on.

Well, the guys at Just in Time have done it in their own sweet nonproprietary way, basing the BillCast platform on Java and XML (Extensible Markup Language) to ensure an open-systems approach. They started with a bare-bones list of data definitions and a few choice request/response parameters to support desired billing and payment activities. They worked their way out from there to dynamic HTML templates, which define the content rendered to users on bill-presentment Web sites. Let's take a look at some of the implementation details.

Distributed data architecture

At its core, the BillCast platform consists of Java code and XML-compliant data structures; it implements reusable components to provide the dynamic content and user interaction needed for a comprehensive bill presentment and payment application. The following sections highlight the main components.

Anythings

The foundation of the BillCast platform rests on a set of predetermined input and output (request/response) parameters passed between the presentation server on the frontend and the integration server on the backend. These parameters are defined in a meta-information file, and transported/packaged by Anythings.

Anythings are nested, XML-compliant universal data structures (objects and strings) that the BillCast system uses to ensure that requests for data (input parameters) from the presentation server are mapped to corresponding data responses (output parameters) on the integration server. Anythings ensure that the data requested by one server correspond to the data returned by the other. Anythings are shipped from the presentation server across an XML-compliant interface (represented by the meta-information file) to the integration server. After accessing databases or legacy systems to obtain the appropriate response data, the integration server generates a response Anything using the retrieved information as output parameters, as illustrated in Figure 3.

 

Improve efficiency with Visual Studio(r) 2010 Beta 2. - Microsoft

About Us | Advertise | Contact Us | Terms of Service/Privacy

Copyright, 2006-2008 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.