Unicon adopts Service oriented architecture (SOA), which is vital to bring the requisite business agility and IT flexibility guaranteed by Web Services. Service orientation refers to the process for integrating diverse systems. Any IT resource including an application, software, or system, can be considered as a service.

Unicon Worldwide takes up service orientation in order to help achieve the organizational goals by making software system more responsive to business needs, easier to develop, and simpler to maintain and handle. Unicon Worldwide emphasizes on implementing a solution architecture based upon service orientation that can help organizations anticipate the change, rather than responding reactively

SOA is carried out by developers and solution architects at Unicon Worldwide. However, stakeholders in a service-oriented solution cover an array of roles and it is really crucial that not only their interests be taken into consideration but also that they actively design the SOA solution.

Case Study on Web Application Development utilizing SOA

The Client

Unicon Worldwide built a web application with SOA. It was an online game developed for parents and children. Taking into account the ease of playing, the project focused on making the application as easier as possible and incorporating new features and upgrading the application. The client demanded Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to build this application. And Unicon Worldwide team made it possible after the in-depth research and systematic process.

This web application was developed with the purpose of helping parents reward their children with this wonderful game that can be played and enjoyed by whole family. For parents, it is a great gizmo that can facilitate everyday parenting challenges while for children; it is an awesome way to build confidence, communication skills and more interestingly, pocket money.

The Challenge

The web application was developed utilizing Visual Studio 2003(ASP.NET) while the database was maintained in SQL Server 2000. A Service Oriented Architecture was followed throughout. This web application posed many challenges. One of them was to design and develop the site with an interface that could attract children of all age groups.

Another challenge that was resolved by Unicon was to develop the website in such a manner that would ensure stability, ease of maintenance as well as scalability in the future. The database was optimized to hold at least 10,000,000 registered parent accounts, each with an average of three children accounts. Special consideration was provided to allow subsequent upgraded versions of the site that will be offered to schools and other organizations.

Furthermore, the application had to be divided into three components, all of which could be run on different servers. This task was executed in order to ensure the scalability of the application for which the database layer was required to be implicitly separated. To enable this three layer model, the presentation code and the application logic had to be hosted separately. Though it can not be called an issue, but it would extensively affect scalability in future.

The Solution

As per client's demand, Unicon Worldwide developed this web application utilizing SOA. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) based approach utilizes a gateway as the central point to authenticate the user identity. The gateway leverages open standards and enables flawless access to various applications with single sign-on capability. Single sign-on makes the authentication process simpler within an enterprise by granting a valid user access to each participating application without any need of re-entering user credentials.

The Bottom Line

This game project posed an out of the ordinary security challenge - to design a web application that was to be implemented in a comparatively small managed hosting environment that could probably be upgraded to a high volume and high security environment subsequently. There was expected a small security risk in the beginning because of minor user base. However, the client wanted the application to adhere to strict COPPA legal framework, which conferred a special care required to be taken not to store unessential personal information, be it the interactive forums or other areas of the website. This demand required a powerful authentication since a considerable public compromise could turn into a PR disaster, means almost a certain damage to the company. In addition to this, with the popularity of website and increase in user base, security risk would also tend to increase. Thus, associated controls would require scaling in line with this scenario.

Unicon Worldwide not only came up with a highly secure and scalable website based on SOA but also gave its incalculable input to augment its functionality to maximum