Friday, November 05, 2004

Journey To The Past (11): PC Banking (1999-2001)

Our department was also developing and maintaining a PC banking system. For several years, the frontend used to be a 16bit Windows / MFC application. I was leading a developer team that ported the old client to Java, utilizing Swing, JDBC (Sybase SQLAnywhere), and an in-house application framework.



Besides the complex business logic, and the need for a RDBMS-to-OOP data mapping, realizing a powerful graphical user-interface in Java was the most difficult challenge. We had to build several more complex controls on our own, like data grids and navigation panels. The client runs under Windows as well as under Linux and MacOS.

The PC banking application is mainly aimed for business customers. It reached an installation base of about 5.000 companies at the end of 2002, while another 50.000 companies were expected to upgrade within the following 12 months.