BOF: Pizia Framework for Telcos
Abstract
MC-link is an ISP based in Rome, Italy.
Our customers, mainly small/medium companies and professionals, are scattered across the whole country, with peaks in the biggest cities (Rome, Milan, Turin, Florence, etc.).We own an optic fiber network which covers the Rome metropolitan area, but elsewhere we need to
buy an xDSL connection from other telco companies and then resell it, added with valuable services, to our customers.
So we need to know, for each city of Italy and for each company that is a supplier of ours in that city, the available xDSL products and then acquire the one fittest to our customer needs (and of course the one most profitable for our company).
To reach this goal we built an application that, given a customer telephone number, queries the B2B systems of our suppliers to discover the available products in that area, applies a few rules to rank them in the proper order, determine if any of the product must be excluded and then return the list to the system/operator the initiated the search.
The application has been designed to allow the greatest flexibility and component reuse. It uses the best of breed of the available open source frameworks to allow the developers to be concentrated on the business logic instead of writing cumbersome plumbing code. So it happens to be a good example on how to integrate Hibernate 3, Spring 2, XFire and Betwixt in a multithreaded application that heavily relies on Java 5 concurrent facilities.
The application is named Pizia (Pythia), after the priestess presiding over the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi.
She was widely credited with giving prophecies inspired by Apollo, and was the most prestigious and authoritative oracle in the ancient Greek world.
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