Home

 

Interoperatility considerations

So far, everything is quite self-contained. Although clients can connect from the Web to use the Internet banking facilities, the business logic is all contained within the bank's systems, and even the Java application and Java EE Application Client are expected to be within the bank's private network.

The next step in developing our service is to enable mortgage agents, who search many mortgage providers to find the best deal for their customers, to access business logic provided by the bank to get the latest mortgage rates and repayment information. While we want to enable this, we do not want to compromise security, and we need to take into account the fact that the mortgage brokers might not be using systems based on Java at all.

The League of Agents for Mortgage Enquiries has published a description of services that its members might use to get this type of information. We want to conform to this description in order to allow the maximum number of agents to use our bank's systems.

We might also want to be able to share information with other banks; for example, we might want to exchange information about funds transfers between banks. Standard mechanisms to perform these tasks have been provided by the relevant government body.

These issues are all related to interoperability, which is the domain addressed by Web services. Web services allow us to enable all these different types of communication between systems. We will be able to use our existing business logic where applicable and develop new Web services easily where necessary.

ibm.com/redbooks