Next Generation Service Delegation Framework
The GarageCraft framework provides you with incredible flexibility in integrating our applications with your existing systems. From user authentication to customer accounts, the components that comprise our application suite are highly autonomous and loosely coupled. This enables us to replace nearly any component in our system with your existing web service. Additionally, through our web service API, you can integrate services within the GarageCraft domain for other enterprise applications such as enterprise dashboards or enhanced customer applications. This service oriented approach virtually eliminates the complex and costly process of exchanging and synchronizing data, such as account information, between existing monolithic applications and enterprise back-office systems.
Fostering Innovation
Too many great ideas don't get implemented and far too many needs go unmet because of the inflexibility of many institution's information systems.
GarageCraft's line of business applications have the agility to address changing business needs, encourage re-use or multi-use of institution resources while providing long product life-cycles and lower total life-cycle costs.
Service Linking and Delegation Platform
The GarageCraft Service Linking and Delegation Platform (SLDP) is the core of our system. SLDP is implemented using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The GarageCraft SLDP employs a Collaborative Service Model to enable two-way integration with third-party applications easier than ever. SLDP can be rolled out gradually to flow into your enterprise without disrupting ongoing operations. Replace just the parts that need immediate improvement and keep those that still provide value. SLDP easily hosts interfaces and data made available by third-party services. These third-party services can originate from other platforms, programming languages, or even separate geographical locations. Likewise, SLDP web-services offer an API that can be used to incorporate our services within other applications.
Each major GarageCraft feature is implemented as one or more services. Services such as our Finance Service with its support for consolidated invoices and delegated document presentation allows our system to handle virtually any type of charge or credit and show the history in a customer facing ledger; our PCI compliant Credit Card Service supports customer billing to credit cards on file; our Point of Sale service provides excellent cash handling and reporting; our Image Service captures IP camera images and can link them to any other object (such as an AVI tag read) in the system.
Choose Your Hardware
SLDP works with all major AVI readers, access control gates, printers, scanners, and the like. Each hardware device such as an RFID reader or digital input is viewed as a resource with its functions made available as a service. For example, GarageCraft's approach to integration with RFID readers is to utilize our Reader Service to hide the hardware details from the application. The service normalizes the interface to the readers by mapping the unique elements of the particular readers to a common interface used for all readers. This approach enables support of virtually any RFID reader or mixture of reader hardware without requiring changes in the application.
Publish/Subscribe Model
The GarageCraft services communicate using a publish/subscribe model that allows messages generated by the services to be delivered using IP networks to one, or more, end-points simultaneously. The publish/subscribe communication model enables a service to simultaneously deliver messages to our production applications, our test applications, as well as other applications. Communication to and from hardware nodes such as AVI readers, gates, loops, signs, and cameras are handled similarly. Simple switch and sensor inputs will rely on GarageCraft's IO Service to support the publish/subscribe model.
Benefits of Service Oriented Architecture
SOA is an evolution of distributed computing with proven success in complex and dynamic business solutions. An institution's business logic or individual functions, including hardware, are modularized and presented as services for client applications. Application developers or system integrators can build applications composing of one or more services without knowing the services' underlying implementations. A service oriented architecture is a very powerful way to match business needs to an institution's capabilities and to introduce new functionality without disrupting existing applications.