Developer Resource - 'Drop' your financial components into K2 to develop next generation financial application

'Drop' your financial components into K2
to develop next generation financial application

The e-Business environment of Finance

The financial e-Business environment is agile. A news flash about change in the dollar value could result in hundreds of transactions within minutes. This can create flurry of activities related to account information, payments, trade finance and foreign exchange. The customers try to access latest information on account positions, transaction details, consolidated balances, utilisation of credit limits as well as information relating to outstanding loans and deposits. This creates a number of problems for the system such as its ability to manage the peak load, assemble new services to meet customer demand and guarantee quality of service for the continuity of business activities.

Component architecture for financial e-Business

A financial institution needs to have a service-oriented, component architecture for financial e-Business. This architecture could encompass the current service needs for financial environment along with the ability to accommodate future enhancement. The financial architecture will focus on core banking applications such as Data Warehousing for Risk Management, Credit Rating and Reporting System, Payment Routing System (cross-border fund transfers) etc. without worrying for the infrastructure services. This architecture will be used as a blueprint for componentisation of business environment. The component architecture for financial e-business will need the following

1	New financial applications to be developed by assembly of components
2	Distributed, configurable financial components
3	Financial architects to have better control of the application

Enterprise Financial Applicationas assembly of components

Source: Business Component Factory

Development scenarios for ISVs in Financial Domain with K2

There could be several scenarios of development. A financial architect needs to analyse the environment carefully and adopt an implementation strategy. Some of the development scenarios are described below:

Case I: If existing financial applications are developed with CORBA 2.x

If you have realized financial projects with ORBs based on CORBA 2.x, adopting CORBA 3.0 CCM will be a step forward in Component Based Development (CBD). CCM adds a sophisticated runtime environment for components and fully standardized support for deployment. Further, it enhances the application capability (both server and client side) and also provides complete integration with CORBA 2.x, EJB and web services. The migration of CORBA 2.x application to CCM is a straightforward process with K2 Component Server.

Case II: Development of new financial application with CCM

The application (components) development with K2 supports the process of OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA). A typical project development will be as described below:

Case III: If there is mixed environment of CORBA2.x and J2EE

K2 Component Server supports EJB-CCM inter-working. Now, you could visualize a scenario where a new financial application can be developed by mixing

EJB components deployed in a J2EE Application Server with

CCM components deployed in K2 Component Server.

The figure describes a runtime view

Benefits of component development with K2 Component Server

The implementation of financial e-business environment needs high performance component platform. K2 Component Server is designed and developed to meet such challenges in enterprise computing. Let's see some of the key factors that make K2 a right choice.

Develop high quality financial components

K2 is based on CCM, which supports several enhancements over EJB model. The maturity of component model enables developers to express and implement business logic effectively. This helps to create a better business component with enhanced capability for reuse. Some of the key enhancements in CCM over EJB are listed below:

CCM provides more sophisticated choices of component types (e.g. a business processes such as applying for a loan, creating an order can be represented by a process component rather than an entity component)

CCM components have multiple interfaces so that each interface could represent a particular viewpoint for interaction.

Legacy "componentisation" and deployment

K2 enables "componentisation" of both legacy systems and new ones that do not use component paradigm.

Dynamic generation of new financial applications

K2 supports development of new financial application by assembly of components where each component offers a specific set of services for the application.

Example

A financial architect can assemble services of Credit Rating component, Credit Reporting component and Payment Routing component to generate a new application which can manage cross-border fund transfer. Just making appropriate connection between the components using GUI based assembly tool can create this application Architect doesn't have to worry about the implementation details of the components such as language, location, OS etc and doesn't have to make any programming level changes.

Infrastructure services to manage peak load

In fact, K2 is the only component server, which provides configurable load balancing algorithms. It supports four load-balancing algorithms for each service type, which are

Round-Robin,
Least-Loaded-Server
Threshold-Loaded-Server
Least-Memory-Consuming-Host

In addition, it also supports multi-level fault tolerance and fail-over mechanism for both software and hardware faults. Moreover, dynamic clustering enables the support of high performance component platform for the applications.

Management of component application across large network

The financial e-Business needs two levels of management:

Financial Transaction Management
Manage uses of financial components deployed in cluster and associated information such as average transaction time, transactions committed, transactions rolled back, requests served per second, requests coming per seconds.
Network Resource Management
Managing system resources s where application is deployed on a cluster of say 16 nodes supporting existing branch network in 50 countries, accessed by 1000 nodes and meeting the need of a million clients. The management complexity further increases as the system needs to have the ability to add new branches each year to meet customer demands for local services

Conclusion

With adoption of CCM specification by OMG, industry has technology, standards and tools in place which will ensure long promised benefits of component based development. CCM based applications will enable "Assembly" and "Reuse" that will be the key to productivity enhancement, software longevity and cost reductions. The financial application developed with K2 Component Server will help to achieve it.

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