Open Systems Accounting Software

Open Systems was founded in 1976 on the premise of delivering powerful accounting software solutions to small and mid-market customers. Throughout its 25+ years, Open Systems has partnered with thousands of independent resellers, consultants and developers in order to deliver accounting software solutions to over 250,000 small, growing, and mid-market software users.

OSAS is an accounting solution that can be customized, modified and scaled. Modules include G/L, A/P, A/R, payroll, direct deposit, bank reconciliation, fixed assets, job cost and resource manager. Open source code, a portable platform and a flexible interfaces are additional features of the solution.

The Art Of Distributed Development Of Multi-Lingual Three-Tier Internet Applications

In this article we describe the author's experience with the unconventional development of Internet applications. They were developed for a Suisse bank as a joint cooperation between the author located in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and a Suisse software development company. The software was developed in a distributed fashion without any physical access to the production site.

Due to the very strict bank's security rules, previously developed applications used by the newly developed applications were not available for installation on the remote development site. For that reason, simple stubs were developed to emulate the behavior of previously developed but unavailable, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and database applications.

In addition, the application had to support multiple spoken languages, thus the developed software had to be internally independent of any particular spoken language. In this article we describe a number of useful tips and tricks of trade that may be helpful to developers facing similar situations. We will describe the three-tier system architecture, the development of CORBA and database portions of the applications, and present tips on multi-lingual application development.

System Architecture

Figure 1 depicts the three-tier system architecture typical for Internet applications. Users use web browsers to access various online banking applications via the Internet. Applications are executed by a web server. An example of such an application is the quotation of currency exchange rates. The user selects desired currencies and a branch of bank on a query input form and submits the query. The web server accepts the query, processes it, and returns the response back to the user's browser. Depending on the particular application, the web server may consult with a CORBA application server and/or a database server. The response is returned in the user's language of choice (German, French, Italian, or English).

Figure 1. System architecture

Per the bank's internal software development standard, all Internet applications, executed by the web server, are written using Java programming language and Java servlets. Although people from the Microsoft camp will most certainly disagree, this is a de facto standard for writing serious Internet applications.

All servers in the production environment run Sun Microsystems Solaris UNIX operating system. The web server is NES (Netscape Enterprise Server) with the addition of JRun engine for running Java servlets. The database server is Oracle. The CORBA application server is IONA OrbixWeb. CORBA clients use an internally developed API (Application Programming Interface) and wrapper Java classes developed on top of OrbixWeb.

The challenge in this project was to develop software in a distributed fashion without any physical presence at the production site, while still adhering to the very strict bank's security rules.