DnB Application

The client needed an application that was available on the intranet, but would go out on the internet to obtain critical credit related data from D&B. D&B provides an API to extract business related information through an API that allows subscribers to retrieve payment information, payment history, credit rating and marketing information. The data retrieved will then be used by the credit agent to make critical credit approval decisions which are effective and efficient. Since the data is subscription based, there was a need to store and make available any data that was recently retrieved without going to the main D&B server.

The application that was provided as a solution to the clients needs provides the following features:
Authentication of Users: In order to establish a login session to DnB application, all users must first log in with DnB Application user id and password for validation to take place. Once the user's details have been successfully validated, they are then enabled to commence their searching and product ordering.
Customer selection: A user is allowed to provide basic criteria to look for a customer. The application will look up the local cache, if data is available, it will provide the basic data plus an indication of what data is available. It will also look up the remote D&B database for matching customers and provide the list to the user who can then make a rational decision as to whether it is the same customer, retrieve from cache or retrieve from the remote database.
Product Selection: The user can choose from any of the products that the client has subscribed to with D&B. Based on the user's choice, the application will retrieve from the cache or from the remote database.
Fresh / Cached data: All data retrieved from D&B is stored in local database along with a time stamp. This allows the user to make a decision with respect to the currency of the data. The user is allowed to make a choice when presented with the data to choose data from the cache or retrieve fresh from the remote database.

Technologies used: The application uses a secure a protocol that is proprietary to D&B to communicate with the remote database. The APIs used here are provided by D&B. These APIs use XML as the means of sending and receiving data. The application is programmed using the DNB toolkit, J2EE components such as JDBC, Servlets and JSP, Oracle. It is deployed on a Sun Solaris machine. It also uses Oracle as the primary repository for the cache implementation.