ting all operating units on the same IT page.
Grigg’s mission, explains Renouf, was to bring
the regions together by building new systems
on a single platform that Travelex could use to
develop, integrate, and
deploy in many regions
around the globe.

That platform is Java, which provides a rich, standards-based, portable, scalable, reliable, and fully internationalized platform for application development. “Java is a very rich development environment, and you can use it for any application,” says Renouf, whom Grigg recruited. “But the richness of Java comes more into its own in enterprise and B2B [business-to-business] systems,” Renouf continues, “because the facilities for integration that different open source and EJB [Enterprise JavaBeans] technologies offer is coupled with the richness of the Web and internationalization functionality. This allows us to take our organically grown local systems and federate them to our regional operations around the world.

At the same time,
Renouf adds, the inter-
faces and mechanisms Travelex uses allow
the company to gradually align the architec-
ture across its many different regions, “while
still changing the overall estate to give richer
functionality and more-agile delivery.”
One of Travelex’ first new Java systems has
been its Global Payments Gateway (GPG),
which was developed, tested, and deployed
in less than nine months. GPG comprises a
“complete Java and Oracle stack,” says Renouf,
including Oracle WebLogic Server 11 g, Oracle
Database 11 g, and other Oracle products. Be-
sides processing international currency trans-
actions for Travelex’ many business and finan-
cial institution clients, GPG
also connects those clients to
the many Society for World-
wide Interbank Financial
Telecommunications (SWIFT)
financial messaging networks.

will only need to process a few transactions per minute, says Renouf.

But the real point of Java, he explains, is that it provides a common architecture that is the same everywhere, which Travelex can easily integrate from development to deployment. “That way we can do the same thing in different regions,” he says.

Java’s internationalization features enable
Travelex to support dozens of local languages
in the front end of their systems, as well as
the business logic that runs behind them. In
this way, it’s now easier to deploy features
developed for the U.S. market, for example, in
places like China and Japan.
One area in which Travelex
has done a great deal of work
on its own is reliability, says
Renouf. Because of govern-
ment regulations around
the world, Travelex needs to
understand how, why, and
where its systems might
fail and how to recover. Java
makes this considerably
easier than other program-
ming environments, says Re-
nouf. “Java provides an awful
lot of tools out of the box to
enable you to understand
exactly what’s going on, though most people
don’t exploit them,” he says. “We build on
what we learn from those tools to diagram
and document behavior under exceptional
conditions and to work out how to develop
more-reliable and secure systems.” ●

More than a Technology

For Colin Renouf, enterprise solutions architect at Travelex Group, Java is more than a technology platform for developing enterprise systems whose virtues of portability, scalability, program-mability, and reliability are unmatched. To Renouf, one of the most important assets of Java is the Java community.

As with any vibrant community, individual participation is vital for the Java community’s health and growth. Travelex, for instance, was involved in the security around internationalization of the Java platform—looking at some of the conversions in different layers as a result of double-byte character sets, for example, and how to ensure that, as Renouf puts it, “what hits the Java layer is what it should be.” Some of this work has been provided back to Oracle and other partners, and some has gone back to the community as a whole.

Travelex is also involved in educational efforts. “A number of people on our team are very active in the Java community,” says Renouf. “Three of us have written books and for magazines, worked on standards, run community events, and on occasion have even done work for some of our customers or have externally supported big industry events.” Renouf adds that he and his colleagues encourage others to participate as well. “It’s a great way to learn and get collaboration on meeting some of your requirements, and it brings a level of satisfaction in knowing that you have ‘made a difference,’” he says, concluding, “Power belongs to those who participate.”