Finally out of the Black Box! 

I have been involved in the architecture of several software solutions, majority of which have been B2B, B2C or C2C Web Applications. However, today marks my first day as a proud Web Engineer, Architect and true Integrator within the Enterprise Application development circles. There is something incredibly gratifying about seeing your “creation” put to use by 1,000s of people and applications. To a large extent, it makes me feel only next to the highest being. It reminds me of the feeling I get when I see people admiring my artwork in an exhibition gallery. I love to CREATE! OK, maybe I’m getting too carried away with all the success.

In case you are wondering where this joy stems from, I successfully deployed a highly-scalable, high-availability, very secure and reliable integrated multi-platform paging solution to our production environment last night. Yes, it has been done in so many different ways for ages, but bringing this project home meant so much to me. I played a key role in the Architecture, Design, Development, Project Management and Implementation of the solution.

The final n-tier Enterprise Application encompasses several powerful technologies and platforms.

  • The Presentation Tier resides on a Windows Server and is a product of ASP.NET, AJAX, the .NET 2.0 Framework and C#
  • The Database is an ORACLE database, sitting on a Unix (Solaris) box
  • The Core back-end application resides on a Unix server and comprises of 2 object-oriented Perl Scripts, a Unix Shell Script and a “postemsg” Binary file

The project solution affords us the much-needed independence from Email, so far as paging is concerned. Though Standard Email and SMTP are quite reliable in most cases, they are not always timely — making it less desirable for emergency or urgent paging. This inability to guarantee delivery between all nodes at all times is even more critical when it comes to sending page messages to DBAs and Systems Administrators regarding System Alarms, in a Fortune 500 Bank. Hence, the new solution!

I’m having fun “tailing” the page logs and watching all the 100s of servers and 1000s of applications route their alarms through the new solution. It is amazing what we can achieve by focusing on using the best technologies and tools for the job!