Development of Alternative Online Payment Solution

The client is an e-commerce company providing payment solutions to merchants who wish to accommodate non credit card clients, relying on existing phone billing infrastructure.

Product Strategic Vision

Working with the client to identify the product strategy and define the product roadmap allowed us to come up with a business-based development approach focused on the client's strategic needs and priorities.

The Solution

We designed an online-payment system that allows customers without credit cards to pay for products or services using a modem, or through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. It consisted of a Web-based transaction processing system, merchant integration components, as well as account setup and maintenance portals. The system included also integration interfaces for telephone billers, Automated Clearing House providers and Line Information database (LIDB) providers.

Incremental approach, distributed development

We followed an incremental approach in developing the application, which allowed us to ascertain the needs and required technology. Because of this product depending on broad domain areas, we coordinated the work with other development companies in the United States.

Integration

We specified the different integration interfaces with different components developed by other teams. We created Applet-based APIs and Web-services interfaces and provided test harnesses, using a test-driven approach that ensured those other teams could work independently on their components.

Multiple user platform support

Since we were dealing with a customer-based payment solution, different versions of the most common platforms (Windows and Mac) had to be supported. We designed a multi-layered client architecture that drew on plugins used only if/when required, thus reducing delegation of platform-specific components.

The Final Product

The product was released on the agreed date and within the approved budget. We developed the Java-based transaction processing system using the Spring Framework and Hibernate for supporting Oracle and MySQL databases, as well as a web-services based API for merchant integration. The solution runs on Solaris and Mac XServe. The client plugins were developed as an Active-X Control for IE, an XPI Plugin for Firefox, and an Applet using native code for Mac OS X. The plugins were integrated with an Ajax-based web interface.