Here we describe several of our projects to give you an idea what we have done already.
Management Console
This project is a rich user interface above complex API (for firewall monitoring and management).
API was provided as a set of SOAP web services. UI was built as a standalone web application, written in Java and utilizing Google Web Toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) to build rich interface in web browser. In fact, this application is not only UI: as some webservices are very slow and some depend on each other, management console includes complicated caching mechanism with multi-threading handlers. Special care was taken to handle errors, because web services sometimes crashes or simply does not return anything (e.g. because of hardware failures).
A statistic collecting and analyzing tool for regional government.
The task was to build a system which helps statistical department of Novosibirsk Regional Government to collect and analyze statistical information, related to villages and small towns. The system allows government official to design forms (telling the system what data they are looking for). Then these forms are filled by the officials in villages and result gathered back to the central office, where they placed into database. The other part of our system provides UI for constructing different queries to this database, for officials to analyze the statistic. There were following challenges during this project:
1) As officials build forms themselves, we can’t have static database for collecting data from these forms
2) As database is not fixed, it is not a trivial to develop query-constructor
3) As data collected from villages, in most of them they had old weak computers
All these issues were successfully solved.
Product is used by the regional government.
A system of financial portfolio management
The idea behind this project is to allow private investors keep their portfolio balanced. At first, system let them to form portfolios, suggesting financial instruments suitable for reaching their goals. Then, it checks for the current instrument’s quotes and recommends financial transactions intended to keep portfolio balanced. It also provides professional financial advisors with ability to sell their consulting service to users that want more than just keeping portfolio balanced.
The main challenge behind this system was the fact that users make mistakes. So, one could insert wrong information into the system, telling e.g. he have bought X shares of some instrument for 300 eur0, while in reality price was 30 euro. It could happen than he finds this error only e.g. 2 weeks later. And now, he needs a way to fix it. Meaning – a way to edit a transaction from the past. It is not a trivial task to allow him doing so, without ability to break the data integrity.
However this problem was successfully solved.
A hardware tester management system
This system is somehow similar to management console. However for management console we develop UI only, while here we develop all the system, including UI and server, which directly communicates with hardware testers via TCP/IP. The goal of the system is to gather information from given hardware, present it in suitable form to operator and allow operator to send commands back to hardware to execute. Project uses the same technologies as a lot of other our projects: java, OSGi, Spring Framework, Eclipse Link, Google Web Toolkit and several other open source frameworks.
Business intelligence system
The goal of this system was to automate monitoring of competitors activities on the web. The system includes web spiders that periodically surf about 100 web sites of big European corporation’s competitors, analyzing block, which found pages that changed, removed or added, and the UI allowing convenient access to this information. As all the above, this project was made with java and open source frameworks.
In general, we have completed about 50 projects since 2002.