Architecture

As technology has progressed, CentreBill has been through several design iterations. At all times, the design philosophy has been to embrace latest trends in technology, but not be at the "bleeding edge". The technologies utilized must be robust and well supported. As far as possible, the design has incorporated open source components.

Furthermore, the architecture must be scalable and modular. CentreBill can thus be run on either Windows or Unix/Linux platforms. It fully supports a distributed network architecture model ensuring performance and scalability. Likewise, the entire application can be run on a single processor PC without any functional degradation.

The database schema and application have been optimized for performance and maintainability. Object Oriented technologies have made the development and reusability of the code base (objects) for various functions in the application, fast and easy to deploy.

The development team behind CentreBill previously had experience in large scale projects in the corporate manufacturing and banking sectors. They therefore had a full appreciation of the nature of software development methodologies for such corporate environments. These disciplines have been adopted in the development of CentreBill.

The diagram below shows the major components that make up CentreBill:




The actual structure of the application is based on a multi-tier model. This is adhered to throughout the architecture and fully exploits the OO capabilities of the technologies selected. This structure is shown below:




Technology Considerations

The following technologies have been used:

• Database - MySQL V5 – this has been proven to be robust, scalable, reliable and with excellent performance. CentreBill was originally developed on Oracle V8, but this became too costly. As there are no database specific calls within CentreBill, the port to MySQL was achieved in a matter of hours. Likewise, the provider may chose to use an alternative database should there be a corporate standard already in place in the organization.
   
• Business and Presentation Logic – all business logic is developed in J2EE. This has made the development life fast and the code base easy to support as skills in J2EE are plentiful. Glassfish Server from Sun is the technology adopted due to its extensive support and adherence to standards.
   
• Admin Interface –this has been developed in a very powerful and well supported RAD application adhering to OO principles called Omnis – see http://www.omnis.net/. Omnis is a long term technology having been in the industry for over twenty five years. It has evolved with time and is chosen by many developers for its platform independence, especially across Mac and PC. The GUI widget set is extremely rich and easy to work with. The learning curve for newbie's, whilst steep, is typically only two weeks long.
   
• Customer Web Interface – the customer view has been developed in Java and is fully integrated into the backend.
   
• Reporting – Jasper Reports has been used for reporting. Performance has been excellent and development time slashed with the adoption of Jasper.
   
• Collectors – these are specific to the technology supplied by the vendor, e.g. Perl and PHP.