Deutsche Post Uses JeeWiz! in Key Role

When Deutsche Post, the largest Postal group in Germany with companies such as DHL, Post Bank and others needed to construct a proprietary integration infrastructure, they turned to JeeWiz! to assist. JeeWiz! enabled the company to ensure that a changing infrastructure would not threaten the stability of large systems.

The Service Oriented Platform (SOP) enabled divisions within the group to integrate web services using this infrastructure. Transport, security, transactions and synch / asynch properties could all be set in the WSDL-like definition file. By enabling such a rich infrastructure, the SOP group felt sure that it would enable a long term solution that would face up to aggressive acquisition schedules from subsidiary companies, such as DHL.

The robust design for the SOP platform from Deutsche Post, presented some challenges to any product that hoped to serve as an integration product. Especially when this product was to be used to simplify the introduction of such a platform. Such a product needed to conform to some critical prerequisites:

• The product had to be able to adapt to the complex deployment environment. Most of the business applications making use of this integration platform would be critical business systems. Such systems could not tolerate errors in operational environments.
• No significant learning curve. Deutsche Post found that to train a developer for the first time to work on the infrastructure includes several weeks of mentoring. This was problematic since it increased the effort - and therefore the cost and risk for development teams to take on the SOP infrastructure.
• A code generation tool had to reduce the cost and risk in introducing a new infrastructure. In this sense JeeWiz! excelled. Throughout the development of the infrastructure, the code generation capabilities of JeeWiz! could be adjusted fairly straightforwardly.
  By enabling the infrastructure to read the definition and automatically generate the client accessors, JeeWiz! could prove its power in an operational environment. It was critical to be able to generate a client tester for services so that these could be tested and optionally also deployed to the production environment.
  When the SOP platform upgrades its version numbers, JeeWiz! should be able to rebuild the infrastructure code needed. This would enable consumers to simply "rebuild" the infrastructure when there is a version upgrade. This feature would ensure that the SOP platform is not constrained by operational code to move forward to implement new features.
• The SOP platform includes several 3rd party tools. These tools need to be integrated in the code that is generated by the infrastructure. By allowing seamless integration, JeeWiz! would further insulate the operational environment from changes in this aspect.
• Enable legacy to be wrapped. Legacy systems will need to be transferred to the SOP platform. The cost and risk of such a move will be included in the business case made for such a move. By reducing both the cost & risk, JeeWiz! enables the business case for these moves to be made.
• For large data transforms, the SOP platform already had some commercial tools available to do this. However, sometimes the trivial data conversions does not necessarily mandate such a heavy handed solution. In these cases JeeWiz! enabled users to make quick and simple data transformations to be done.