Challenge

A major technology investment is risky. When it directly impacts the core of a substantial customer base, you'd better get it right now. No missteps, no second entrance. Pile on requirements: scalable, multilingual, seamless integration with an uncertain heterogeneous infrastructure. In business as in life, you can't cross a chasm with small steps. Vonage Worldwide made the leap, choosing Ajax and SOA for the next version of their subscribe system. Vonage needed a scalable, maintainable solution for a multilingual front-end to their generated web services backend.

• The backend would be replaced by a newer version within half a year, therefore requiring a way to upgrade from one backend using SOAP to a new one using REST with no disruption
• A primary requirement for improved user-friendliness and intuitive operation sought to yield higher click-through rates and sales completions
• A mission-critical system supported a predominately online sales model; it had to function with zero downtime
• Strict deadlines had to be met due to agreements with the Canadian government on a multilingual websites
• An easy to maintain CMS to process the multilingual content and other changes was mandatory

Solution

The Vonage Worldwide solution needed to address a number of high-level requirements, including security for an open interface, data validation, and support for changes in communications protocol and xml format as well as meet a rigorous release schedule.

Vonage Worldwide selected Javeline to provide the solution, based on their solid Ajax and SOA track record. Javeline brought on a senior and highly skilled engineering team with extensive experience in heavy client-side and volume transactional models, along with the Javeline suite of products for developing and managing the entire Ajax and SOA web application space.

Javeline's Messaging Bus provided the layer between the Vonage web services and front end to create a secure open interface. The growing subscription customer base and accompanying traffic load on the current web services were addressed by a much needed abstraction that enabled the system to change protocols and even xml format as needed, without touching the front end application.

The Messaging Bus also cached web service calls and packaged largely persistent data, significantly reducing the load on the web service, and producing an increase in speed

Javeline's InForm provided the mechanism for updating and reworking the application interfaces, improving user response, and sharply raising quality through strong data handling and input validation.

The strict mission-critical deadlines were matched by the Javeline team's experience with PlatForm, working together and in concert on tightly coupled project components. PlatForm's declarative approach ensured rapid setup times, producing a steady flow of change requests, revision implementations, and a solid product. In fact, as a testament to the solid maturity of the PlatForm product and its development use, the system went online after a highly compressed QA cycle. A subsequent follow up produced only minor bugs and some functional changes.

These inevitable tweaks and text edits were migrated into the system flawlessly, using the same Javeline CMS with WYSIWYG editing (available with the commercial license of PlatForm) that managed the development process from the outset. An added benefit was that reading the data directly from the web service revealed otherwise hidden content for translation, which was imported directly into the CMS.