European Commission – Directorate General Research & Innovation (abbreviated RTD): Florent conducted an audit of the Common Data Model, developed by a join working group between DIGIT, RTD and INFSO. The CDM is the central piece of the SOA initiatives in the several Research DGs at the European Commission, providing a standardized data model in XML Schema and a series of common Web services. The audit aimed at advising the working group on technical aspects (mainly XSD and WSDL) as well as potential SOA governance issues (like versioning, releases, discoverability, SOA goals & concepts, and documentation).
The Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (also known as OECD, in French OCDE) is an international economic organization of 34 countries, based in Paris. A large part of their objectives is publishing documents and statistics. They naturally use more and more XML to represent their content, and wanted to start a first project using XProc to leverage its integration of several core XML technologies in order to represent their XML processing pipelines. Florent wrote and gave a training on XProc, from the very basis to setting up the architecture of the project.
CEDICAM is the « Cards & Payments » entity of the Credit Agricole Group, and as such has to implement the new European Directives relative to financial transactions and payments in the SEPA zone. This represents a huge volume of heterogeneous data, received and stored in an EMC native XML database (also known as XDB), and accessed and modified using XQuery. Florent worked on the XQuery layer (principally designing the query generation, and the optimization of queries on large data streams).
Wiley is one of the largest publishing companies in science and academics.
Wiley Online Library is its subscription‐based, multidisciplinary digital library.
According to Wikipedia, « Wiley Online Library delivers integrated access to over 4 million articles from 1500 journals, 9000 books, and hundreds of reference works, laboratory protocols and database ». All the publications are stored in a MarkLogic native XML database. Florent worked on the XQuery and XSLT layers, in particular on the query optimization on large documents volumes and sizes.
Brussels Business Analyst and Architect: The Directorate General Research & Innovation (abbreviated RTD) is responsible for the founding of research in Europe. It has one of the largest budgets of the European Commission, and handles XXXX of new contracts a year, with Universities, Consortia, SMEs, and individuals. The processes involved are complex, and sometimes participants want to submit requests for redress.
The handling of such requests for redress used to be manual. This project was aimed at developing a new web application accessible to the participants (frontoffice application accessible from the outside world). Florent was the Business Analyst from the very beginning and the Java EE Architect. The technologies used were Java EE 5 on Oracle WebLogic, using Oracle database through Hibernate, with JSF for the front‐end and Spring for the bean container.
Integration with the participant portal was achieved through Web services.
Acheron Capital is an investment found company based in London. Due to a very fast growth, their IT was not able to cope with the changes in the company.
The project was to analyze, design and implement an entirely integrated custom back‐office, based on SOA principles in order to enable the IT to rapidly adapt to futures changes (at the time, other companies were being seen as potential acquisitions).
Brussels Mobistar: The ability for a customer to look at his/her consumption in real time on the Mobistar portal was the opportunity for Mobistar to have a first shot at the SOA technologies and principles. While they had already a range of Web services, they were used principally as a mean of integration. Mobistar was interested in particular in the various WS‐* specs and the concept of an ESB to provide a standardized communication and integration facility accross the whole enterprise. Florent designed the contract of several independent Web services and implemented them using Java EE, and he took part in the design of the whole SOA solution and of the ESB implementation.
Brussels Result of several merges and acquisitions, ING Lease Belgium decided to build a new back‐office application for its employees. In order to leverage legacy systems, SOA was the natural approach. It was also the opportunity to rework all the documents (from quotes and invoices to contracts and reminder letters).
Florent analyzed those documents, coming from several different entities, in close relationship with the business, factorized them out, modeled them and implemented them, from generating an abstract XML representation out of the database, transforming it using XSLT to XSL‐FO, to finally generate PDFs.
has to evaluate all requests for founding through committees of experts (the domains of the proposals is broad and can be as complex as nuclear research). Those evaluations last from a few hours to several weeks or months; they can involve a few experts to hundreds of them. This project provided a distributed application to help the executives to manage the evaluations, the experts, the buildings and the rooms where they take place, and the facilities they provide. PDF plans and tables are generated through XSLT and XSL‐FO using a homemade SQL‐to‐XML bridge.
FO expert: A new application was created at RTD in order to allow participants to fill in several forms online. Florent analyzed the original forms with the business, helped the business to rationalize them and factorize them out, and wrote a set of XSLT stylesheets to generate them back in PDF.
XML Expert: A new system was developed to handle the negotiations between RTD and participants in order to define the exact terms of the contracts. The system used Orbeon Server (providing XForms) for the front‐end, eXist for the database, XPL for the XML pipeline language, and used intensively XSLT and XQuery to access and transform data.