Chapter 6 Application Examples
6.1 CORBA solution for a new generation of BOSS systems
Figure 6-1 Structure diagram of a BOSS system based on CORBA
6.1.1 Abstract
Due to the characteristics of CORBA itself - openness, scalability, security and advancement - with the technical requirements of the new generation of BOSS systems, the company can naturally match, China Mobile (Shenzhen) company proposes a CORBA system-centric Have your own solution. This paper clarifies the CORBA solution for China Mobile (Shenzhen) company's new generation BOSS system, and the feasibility and advancement of the program will be described with the development example of the GPRS and Dream Network SMS billing system.
6.1.2 Foreword
China Mobile BOSS System (Business Operation Support System) is based on computer network and related application technology to support China Mobile's operations. Functional, the BOSS system covers billing, settlement, accounting, business management, customer service, etc., and interconnects with relevant external systems based on the business needs.
Most of the existing mobile BOSS systems use "distribution model", ie each province, each city branch set a business management center, built a separate business account system, store and manage customer data of the local branch, Business data and accounting data. In this way, the platform construction, business management, data, and system design are excessively dispersed, and the real-time life is based on this situation. To adapt to the continuous new data business, the growing data volume and continuous improved real-time requirements. For existing BOSS systems, the BOSS system must be transformed, concentrated, real-time, and transformation of the three-story platform.
The construction goal of the BOSS system is to achieve "three features, two capabilities, a synthesis". "Three Features" is an important feature of providing "personalization, socialization, information" services; "two capabilities", "satisfying future business development needs", "satisfying real-time processing"; "a synthesis "Provide a comprehensive business processing platform. The system is customer-centric, providing a variety of customer-stated services, realizing unified interface, unified platform, unified service, unified standards and unified quality requirements; strong real-time processing capabilities; good scalability to meet new business , The development of new services; with unified business processing and management processes, unified interfaces, unified protocols, and unified data formats.
We propose the BOSS system solution, with CORBA technology as the core, with flexible, modular overall architecture, and make full use of advanced technology to develop a new generation of BOSS systems.
Object-oriented technology solves the traditional object technology only exists in one program, the externally unacceptable shortcomings, so that different manufacturers can pass different address space, network, and operating systems to access each other, greatly improve system maintainability and Reuse. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a technical specification that generates an object-oriented system, called an object request intermediary, which allows applications that can be written in different languages or communicate on distributed networks (such as Internet) on different platforms. Its specific implementation, location, and indiscriminate operating system are transparent to customers.
We not only prove the advanced nature and feasibility of CORBA technology from many ways, but we have actually applied CORBA technology to a billing system, but also achieve good results. The following sections will have a more detailed description in the following sections.
6.1.3 BOSS system architecture
During the new generation of BOSS system implementation, the following technical principles are required:
(1) Openness: Based on the industry open standard, China Mobile will conduct national unified planning, laying the foundation for future business development;
(2) Flexibility and scalability: In order to adapt to the business opportunities of the business opportunities and domestic markets, the new generation of BOSS systems should have the ability to expand the capacity of the equipment and enhance equipment performance, should have flexible configuration of business processing Features, as well as the flexibility of service functionality and update; (3) Security reliability: system concentration, especially data concentration, so that new generation BOSS systems have higher requirements for security, and the system should provide good Security and reliability strategy, support a variety of security and reliability technical means to develop strict security and reliability management measures;
(4) Advanced: Advanced mature equipment and technology should be adopted to ensure the technical advancement of the system, guarantee the effectiveness and continuation of investment. According to the principles of the two-level system, the three-layer structure, the functions such as billing, settlement, accounting, business and customer service are concentrated, unified, making China Mobile's BOSS system into integration, and the information resources are fully shared. supporting system. "Two-level system" refers to the BOSS system divided into group company-level BOSS system (national center) and provincial BOSS system (provincial centers). "Three-layer structure" means that the BOSS system contains data core layers, business logic layers, and access layers on logical structures.
Follow the principles of the two-level system, three-story structure, the construction of the BOSS system should realize the high share of enterprise effective resources; optimize business processes, improve customer management level, improve service quality; provide scientific, accurate, timely basis for management decisions.
6.1.4 Develop a new generation BOSS system with CORBA
CORBA combines object-oriented and distributed processing technology, and the combination of both is the development direction of today's software industry. The following is the feasibility and superiority of the CORBA development from CORBA development from CORBA.
First, from the architecture, CORBA consists of four parts.
(1) Object Request Agent ORB: It is the core of CORBA, which guarantees that in distributed heterogeneous environments, transparently transmits and receives requests to objects to help implement interoperability between application components. ORB is a "soft server" that supports the CORBA component interaction, and the service component can register it. When the customer object needs some kind of service, it can send a request, orb is responsible for searching for its "registration) Register "service object, start the service, transfer the service to the service object, and transfer the results back to the customer object.
The figure begins in this article is a separate ORB structure, and the arrow describes the call relationship of the ORB. In order to propose a request, the client can use the dynamic invocation or the client's STUB program. The client can also interact directly with ORB.
(2) CommON Object Services: This is some standardized components that are most likely to support constructive applications in distributed object environments. The public object services that have passed have passed by the object naming service, event service, and object survival. Service, permanent object service, object relationship service, etc.
(3) CommON Facilities: It is a reusable component block than public object services, which is mainly used to help construct applications across multiple applications, typical public facilities include user interface, information Management, system management and task management, etc.
(4) Application Objects: It refers to a supplier or user developed a particular product developed by ORB, public object services, and public facilities, which is not standardized in the CORBA architecture.
(5) Idl (Interface Definition Language) stubs and skeletons
IDL is an interface definition language that implements separation of object interfaces and object implementations, shielding the isomer from language and system software. Through the standard IDL compiler, the client's IDL Stub and the server-side SKELETON can be generated. The two of the client program and the server-side program join ORB adhesives, and IDL STUB provides a static interface to access object services, and Skeleton The static interface of the service object is included and is responsible for implementing the connection to the specific method in the object implementation.
(6) Dii (Dynamic Invocation Interface)
DII allows the client application developer to dynamically create and send requests for the service object at runtime, including the quadrature to define the metadata of the service object interface, add parameters, delete requests, and send remote calls.
(7) Interface pool (Interface Repository)
The interface pool mainly contains information about the service object interface defined by IDL. It is mainly to provide related interface information for dynamic calls, and the API provided by CORBA can obtain and modify interface descriptions of all registered objects by accessing the interface pool. Methods and parameters.
(8) Object Adapter
The object adapter is the main mechanism of server-side management object implementation and object references. It receives the service request from ORB, instantiates the service object, generates and interprets object references to the service object, select and activate the correct service object according to the service request, and then Send the service results to ORB.
Second, the above analysis can be seen that the characteristics of the CORBA development of a new generation of BOSS systems are very prominent:
(1) It uses the concept of soft components and softburns to realize the unity between system heterogeneous platforms. The client can fully write applications in different platforms, any manufacturer, computer, operation on different languages. Systems, programming languages, and network-based applications use IIOP standard protocols, so any CORBA-based applications can work together, with good openness and flexibility. This corresponds to the open requirements of the BOSS system. At the same time, the object interface written in the interface description language makes it possible to independence with language-independent independence. IDL allows all CORBA objects to be described in one way, just a "bridge" by local languages (C / C , CORBA or Java) to IDL.
(2) CORBA uses the object reference technology to uniquely determine the object instance in a distributed environment, and implements the distributed object processing.
(3) An object implementation can be called multiple client applications, or other object implementations can also be invoked to realize the reusability and interoperability of the object. Aiming at the three-layer architecture of the BOSS system, this feature corresponds to the second point of technical requirements of the BOSS system - flexibility and scalability. When using CORBA technology, there is no need to deal with existing hardware, network, and software structures, you can connect PCs and its applications to other parts of the company, and provide adaptability to dynamically changed corporate environments. Especially when Corba is used as an object-oriented language, such as C , Java, etc., it is more advantages to the advantages. Our GPRS billing system and SMS system we did in Zhejiang are the cooperation of CORBA and C , which has achieved good results, which exhibited the most prominent advantages in the system flexibility.
(4) The public object service functionality provided by CORBA is very strong, in which event service-based active service Push and Pull technology are a good technique for processing real-time systems. (5) CORBA provides a good fault tolerance mechanism. The fault tolerance mechanism not only implements load balancing, but also allows each object to run on two or more servers. When one of them fails, the system can automatically switch to another server. If the hardware configuration of multiple servers is the same, the server will have high stability and security, so that the server can really achieve high speed, high stability to handle large amounts of data. The third technical requirements for the BOSS system - safety requirements.
(6) CORBA is a technical specification of the IMG organization requesting agency structure in 1991. CORBA has a wide range of applications, which is easy to integrate different computers of various vendors, from the mainframe to the terminal desktop of the micro-embedded system, is an excellent middleware applied to large and medium-sized enterprises. Its advanced and superiority is proven in practice. The advanced nature requirements of the BOSS system can be met.
Third, when we realize the Zhejiang GPRS billing system and the dream network SMS billing system, we have accumulated the use of CORBA and C combined with the development of large data volume, and have high quality experience in real-time, safety, and master Developed with the advantages of the Corbascript scripting language, the advantages such as the powerful function, using the XML file as the configuration file, using the regular expression to perform an error and other skills, combined with the CORBA system, and achieve good results. On the processing of the user interface, we use technologies such as CVS, CGI, HTML, CORBAScript, Oracle, to make human-computer interactions, closely combined with the server, direct interaction, greatly facilitate the user's data management.
In summary, we analyzed the feasibility and advancement of the CORBA solution of the new generation of BOSS systems in theory and practice. Today, in the market opening, today's demand continuously updated today, China Mobile's new generation BOSS system perfect solutions are more effective and conveniently located in the management, improve corporate services, improve corporate service level, management level and management decision-making level, to the world The first-class communication operation enterprises have a very important strategic and practical significance. China Mobile (Shenzhen) company's new generation BOSS system CORBA solution uses advanced Reliable technology to achieve a high quality BOSS system from the technical and market requirements of the new generation BOSS system.
6.1.5 Adopting the intermediate technology allows the system to have the following features:
1. System function is more simplified
The middleware blocks the difference in the next layer of the application, provides basic services necessary in the distributed system (such as transaction processing, security, and name services, etc.), making the development of the system more concentrated on the actual business, without having to face It involves various aspects of the operating environment, thereby making the development of the system more efficient.
2. System function is reused
According to the system-oriented intermediate, there is a feature of objects: closure and reuse. The development of the entire system has developed a functional module with standard interfaces on a standard software bus. Each functional module can be called for other modules on the bus as long as the interface does not change. The change in modules or changes in the operating environment will not affect other parts of the system. For example, the same implementation, the object object can be used in a system different from the payment card payment and stored value card payment, and its client can be a call center system under Windows 2000 or a banking system in a UNIX environment.
3. Online transaction processing can be implemented in a distributed environment
The online transaction processing of the database is usually done under the same process, and in a distributed environment, transaction processing involves multiple processes or multiple systems. There is no participation in the middleware, and transactions between multiple systems are difficult or unable. The middleware processes the transaction between the objects as a general service of the operating environment to ensure online transaction processing in a distributed environment. 4. Guarantee the safety of the original system
In a distributed environment, each system is relatively independent. They are divided into different departments, with their own critical data and information. Even when working together, this information also hopes to be protected, and their respective systems do not want all to expose to collaboration. With middleware technology, collaborative objects are only called each other by standard interfaces, and the data transmission adopts negotiated encryption measures to ensure relative independence of their respective systems.
