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"One of the great things about the Forte for Java IDE is that it encourages good programming habits that really pay off with large and complex projects. It recognizes what each class, such as a servlet or RMI, is trying to achieve and how it interacts with other classes. This creates a programming environment that anticipates what you are doing and reduces time-consuming errors and omissions."
Vincent Bezzina, Managing Director
Endeavour Internet
Business Solutions
The Company: Endeavour Internet Business Solutions
Endeavour Internet Business Solutions is a leading edge technology company dedicated to providing a new generation of business solutions for a new era of mobile and distributed computing. The company products include an e-commerce suite, portal technology, a customer profiling advertising system, and a securities brokerage intermediary system. Endeavour undertakes software projects for clients with particular emphasis on finance.
Endeavour takes a consultancy-driven approach to its projects. The company believes in applying technology to bring about a paradigm shift that creates dramatic business benefits. This involves process re-engineering and integration of back-end systems to leverage the capabilities of a company as a cohesive whole.
The Business Challenge
As one of the most time-sensitive and competitive industries, financial trading presents formidable business challenges to systems vendors. Its systems must be capable of relaying rapidly changing data to the user while the price being offered is still valid. Any delay in presenting the data reduces crucial "think time" for the trader. Developers must also create client interfaces that enable traders to work within a secure environment and react quickly to changing prices. Endeavour sought to address all these critical requirements with its Financial Intermediary Interface to Deutsche Bank's Xavex Online Principal Trading Platform (XOL).
The IT Challenge
As the Endeavour development team created the plan for its Xavex Interface for Financial Intermediaries (XIFI), the team faced the following IT challenges:
- Time Critical Coupling: With processing distributed between a
central system, an intermediary server and client workstations, the
Endeavour team had to ensure that XIFI would function efficiently and
error-free across LAN, WAN, and international leased-line
networks.
- Assured Delivery of Communication: This was required between
the server and remote XOL system over international leased lines that
are susceptible to interruption.
- Server Performance: XIFI had to be designed for high
performance to ensure that the performance of the server would not
become degraded under heavy trading loads.
- Integration with Pumas portfolio management system: The
system would have to work seamlessly with Pumas, an intranet Web
application that calculates commissions and generates contract
notes.
- Strong Audit Control: With customer funds at risk, it was
essential for XIFI to provide strong accountability.
- Flexible infrastructure: The Endeavour team needed to build a
system that would allow other Exchanges to be plugged in easily and keep
cost of ownership low.
The Sun Solution: the Forte for Java Product
Before starting development of the XIFI, the Endeavour team built the Pumas Portfolio Management System, a Web-based application. Upon its completion, the team did a "post mortem" on their experiences -- both positive and negative -- during the project life cycle. They concluded that the development environment they had been using was less than satisfactory, and that it had in fact made their jobs more difficult. With its numerous IT challenges in mind, the Endeavour team set out to find a new integrated development environment (IDE) that was robust enough for the job.
According to Vincent Bezzina, Endeavour managing director, "We are a Java technology shop and visit Java.sun.com several times a day. That's how we found out about the Forte for Java IDE. Since our experiences with Java technology and Sun have been so positive, we decided to give it a try. We were immediately happy with the product. It enables us to use advanced Java features such as RMI without getting sidetracked on language-specific issues. The Forte for Java IDE handles all of these issues automatically, saving time and resources."
Bezzina and his team feel strongly about the Java programming language. He continues, "Java is an extremely powerful language. The features in the language allow programmers to tackle challenges that would be impossible or costly with traditional tools. In fact, we believe that the Java language represents the only tool for developing enterprise-level applications for today's distributed computing environments."
The Endeavour team evaluated one other IDE but found it lacking in features when compared to the Forte for Java product. In particular, the Endeavour team likes the Forte for Java product's platform independence, since it is essential to be able to deploy Endeavour's product solutions in any client operating environment.
"The Forte debugger is excellent. When integrating with other environments, it enables us to quickly determine where problems lie. It allows us to integrate various modules, sometimes using fundamentally different technologies. The debugger also deals very well with multithreaded debugging situations."
Vincent Bezzina,
Endeavour Internet Business
Solutions
Additional features that made the project a success include:
- The way in which the Forte for Java IDE helps harness the power of
Layout Managers.
- The ability of RMI to link the client front end to the server
module. This allowed the time critical coupling of client/server
communication. The Forte for Java IDE handled all the complexities and
mundane tasks of using RMI, allowing the developers to focus on the
business issues.
- Technologies such as JavaServer Pages[tm] (JSP[tm]). JSPs allow a
group of programmers and Web designers to work as a cohesive team, each
leveraging his or her particular skills.
- Intelligent objects are passed via RMI. Objects such as "Quote," or "Trade" contain all the business logic to display and manipulate object data.
The Application
XIFI retrieves real time quotes and allows each trade to be executed while the quote is still valid. XIFI has two main components: the Server Module and the Client Module.
The Server Module
The server module's primary job is to control resources, allowing clients to link to a pool of connections. Once a connection is allocated, the server module's task is to receive outgoing requests from clients and, after appropriate formatting and packaging, forward these request to XOL. The server must also quickly pass on messages to and from XOL and clients.
When a client registers with the server, it gains access to functions on the server via RMI. At the same time, the server gains similar access to functions on the client, thereby completing the coupling of the two modules.
When a request arrives at the server, the server uses a Message Factory to produce message structures for the XOL Protocol. An Object Factory allows other modules to be plugged in easily in the future; updated Object Factories and possible different versions of each factory are also easy to manage.
The Client Module
When a reply comes in via MQ Series, the client module activates a listener. The listener parses the reply and uses the XOL Object Factory to create an object such as a Quote, Trade Confirmation, and so on. This object is then immediately passed to the client via RMI.
Each object contains all the logic it needs to handle its own display. This makes the client design much simpler and allows the client to handle future new objects automatically. The ability of Swing components to display HTML was exploited to allow objects to display their content in an easy-to-understand layout. If the object is a Quote, a timer thread kicks in to display the remaining time for the Quote Validity. The client module is also able to integrate with the intranet-based Pumas portfolio management system, with all interaction conducted via the HTTP protocol.