CSP Upside Down

I’ve not being talking anything on my Project since last November. That does not mean nothing is happening. Well … may be lot of things… lot of changes... happening over the past. So I’ll start from where I stopped in last November.

You’ve already heard about CSP... and its’ in Java. But after some months of development, in last February plan was changed and decided to have CSP in C# .Net. It was not a technical decision, but a marketing one. By that time we have totally finished the CSP design and also the implementation of CSP Framework. This gave me and the others the opportunity to work in .Net 2.0 framework for the first time. So we welcome the change.

Moving to .Net required to do some design changes. Especially in the Caching area and the Messaging area. In Java we used Hibernate and OSCache for caching, in .Net we decided to go for Microsoft Enterprise Libraries. Already there is a version for .Net 2.0.

For messaging in Java we used an existing Messaging Framework, which is a wrapper over JMS and uses Sonic MQ as the Message Broker. In .Net we had to develop a messaging framework, since the existing one is in Java, and it was my major responsibility. Even in .Net we opted to go for JMS with Sonic MQ as the Message Broker. Fortunately there’s wrapper over Sonic Messaging for C# developed by Sonic. So our messaging framework uses that wrapper.

The other major change in Java to .Net conversion is on CSP web service hosting. In Java we used Axis 1.3 as the SOAP engine and the Tomcat 5.5 as the embedded web container. In .Net we had to find a solution to host the web service without IIS and it was Cassini, finally we decided on. At the same time we also did some R&D on Indigo to find out it’s capabilities in self hosting.

Apart from those major changes, to convert business logic from Java to .Net we used Microsoft Java Language Conversion Assistant 3.0 tool, which worked really fine.
For logging we had to change from Loj4J to Microsoft Enterprise Libraries.

Finally... after around two & half moths of development we did our first customer release on last 21st. There supposed to be one week of QA defect fixing cycle. This release has only two API’s implemented and more to come in 2nd and 3rd releases. Anyway, after the defect fixing cycle I’ll be moving to a different module (Loyalty) and CSP will continue…