case study: Refactoring for Success
The Setting
A telecommunications company had developed a network-outage tracking application using Oracle's JDeveloper product. The application used a rich java-based web interface and made connections via a database proxy to a database server.
The Mission
The technologists needed to find a way to provide SSL-based encryption and secure the database traffic at the same time. The database calls were embedded into the applet and used an Oracle-based proxy engine to access the data. As Oracle did not support SSL traffic through the proxy, the current scheme would not work.
The Solution — Bringing Services
e-brilliance led the existing team in moving from the direct database calls within the applet architecture to a more controlled, server-side approach. Common design patterns such as controller, proxy, data access objects, and value objects were employed to allow for a simpler, more scalable application architecture. The final applet-to-server communication architecture was devised after researching the current state of technologies including SSL over Applets, SOAP, RMI, and object streaming.
In addition to upgrading the application architecture, e-brilliance migrated the application to an open-source application server, Apache Tomcat, and installed connection pooling and SSL support. Finally, the development environment was changed to using Apache’s ANT build tool, which will allow any integrated development environment to build the project.
The application is now hosted using SSL, including all calls to the Tomcat server. Customer files are protected from each other by a hybrid security scheme, and the application is now much easier to maintain. e-brilliance ensured that the current staff performed the coding and installed the software so that the team could remain self-sufficient.