Making decisions on how to compete in an e-business world requires an understanding of the technology that underpins e-business. AIGGS is dedicated to the development of high quality systems, which are flexible, reusable, scalable, and handle multilingual requirements.

The OASIS system has been designed using the Rational Unified Process and Unified Modeling Language (UML). The design process was supported by our use of Rational Analyst studio. The design separates out the user interface, business logic and database access into separate layers, and packages the components of the business logic for a cohesive, loosely coupled component architecture.

Each component has the flexibility to be configured for a specific implementation without affecting the rest of the framework. There are also interfaces specifically designed for plugging in to other systems, and providing a unified view of the external system from within the OASIS application.

OASIS provides a well-defined API for each of the application layer components in a single complete and thoroughly tested architecture that can have all of the specific services for a particular application plugged into it. It also provides the generalized logic that supports the flow and processing of information throughout any application based on this framework. Having the OASIS framework speeds up application design and development time, while giving added assurance of quality and maintainability through good design and code reuse.

The development language for the system is Java, which has allowed us to run exactly the same code on both Windows and Solaris platforms. Inter-application communication is handled using both XML and CORBA, depending on the requirements of the system we are connecting to. The framework has flexible interfaces for connection to different databases, host systems, underwriting systems, etc.

The system is developed using VisualAge for Java and WebSphere Studio as our development environment, and is tested for both functionality and load using the Rational Test Suite. For most locations, deployment will be using WebSphere application server, IBM http server, and Sybase database running on Solaris machines.