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• Defining implicit and explicit casts for C# interfaces

  - by ehdv

  Is there a way to write interface-based code (i.e. using interfaces rather than classes as the types accepted and passed around) in C# without giving up the use of things like implicit casts? Here's some sample code - there's been a lot removed, but these are the relevant portions. public class Game { public class VariantInfo { public string Language { get; set; } public string Variant { get; set; } } } And in ScrDictionary.cs, we have... public class ScrDictionary: IScrDictionary { public string Language { get; set; } public string Variant { get; set; } public static implicit operator Game.VariantInfo(ScrDictionary s) { return new Game.VariantInfo{Language=sd.Language, Variant=sd.Variant}; } } And the interface... public interface IScrDictionary { string Language { get; set; } string Variant { get; set; } } I want to be able to use IScrDictionary instead of ScrDictionary, but still be able to implicitly convert a ScrDictionary to a Game.VariantInfo. Also, while there may be an easy way to make this work by giving IScrDictionary a property of type Game.VariantInfo my question is more generally: Is there a way to define casts or operator overloading on interfaces? (If not, what is the proper C# way to maintain this functionality without giving up interface-oriented design?)

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• Determining an object's variable name dynamically?

  - by ZenBlender

  Let's say I have some objects: ArrayList<SomeObject> list = new ArrayList<SomeObject>(); SomeObject A = new SomeObject(); SomeObject B = new SomeObject(); SomeObject C = new SomeObject(); SomeObject D = new SomeObject(); These constructors automatically add each object to the ArrayList so I can iterate over them but still maintain the variable names for direct access: public SomeObject(){ // init stuff here list.add(this); } But then, let's say I want to output some debug info, and iterate through list and print out the NAME of each object? How can I do that? Essentially, when "SomeObject A = new SomeObject();" is executed, I want to use reflection (if possible) to determine that this variable's name is "A" (a String) and either store that in the object when the constructor executes, or determine it dynamically through reflection when referencing this object with the variable named "A". Does that make sense? How can I do this? Thanks!

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• Utility to indexing a directory?

  - by achacha

  Here is what I am trying to do: I have a directory (with sub-directories) with source files, I need to index them so I can find files fast (find as I type) so I can open them for compare/analysis. I don't want it to scan the content, just filename index for quick lookup. I do this when trying to determine if a class exists in a given tree (we maintain directory trees for each release which has a lot of files) and sometimes I want to quickly check files to see how something was implemented, etc. Most of these directories are on remote servers (sometimes on the other side of the world) or on a VM (which is on a server far away), so I only want to read the directory trees once, which is why running find every time is way too slow and doing 'find . foo.txt' and then searching that is a bit tedious. It's kind of like how "Find Resource" works in eclipse after it indexes all files, but it's a bit of a chore to import/remove directories into eclipse every time. Eclipse is also very slow when dealing with remote volumes. Any suggestions are appreciated :)

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• Can it be done?

  - by bzarah

  We are in design phase of a project whose goal is replatforming an ASP classic application to ASP.Net 4.0. The system needs to be entirely web based. There are several new requirements for the new system that make this a challenging project: The system needs to be database independent. It must, at version 1.0, support MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres and DB2. The system must be able to allow easy reporting from the database by third party reporting packages. The system must allow an administrative end user to create their own tables in the database through the web based interface. The system must allow an administrative end user to design/configure a user interface (web based) where they can select tables and fields in the system (either our system's core tables or their own custom tables created in #3) The system must allow an administrative end user to create and maintain relationships between these custom created tables, and also between these tables and our system's core tables. The system must allow an administrative end user to create business rules that will enforce validation, show/hide UI elements, block certain actions based on the identity of specific users, specific user groups or privileges. Essentially it's a system that has some core ticket tracking functionality, but allows the end user to extend the interface, business rules and the database. Is this possible to build in a .Net, Web based environment? If so, what do you think the level of effort would be to get this done? We are currently a 6 person shop, with 2.5 full time developers.

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• Best way to import a pack or "system" of new classes??

  - by Joe Blow

  Here's an Advanced question for Advanced developers. So I've written a largish "subsystem". It is essentially a UIViewController called CleverViewController which is a UIViewController. Now, there are a large number of supporting classes (about ten) that do the hard work: perform math functions, image processing, purely logical functions, build images or what have you with thousands of lines of code. (To do this, I simply started a new XCode project / app "Scratchpad" which does little other than load and launch the CleverViewController. So currently it works as an app, which launches CleverViewController. The ten or so classes I mention that are part of the "subsystem" simply sit there in that project/app.) So now, we will use CleverViewController, the new technology generally, in various apps. (Or perhaps friends would want to use it, etc.) What's the best way to "do" this? Have I screwed everything up, and really it should just be ONE (pretty big) class rather than a dozen classes? (I could understand that then as I would simply add that new (big) class where needed, like adding any other class.) Do I have to make a "framework" like the Apple frameworks? (If so, what the hell are they, how do you do it, etc?!?) In fact, do you just have to lamely include all of the dozen classes and that's that (obviously perhaps putting them in a grouped subfolder). What about all the headers and so on? (Currently I just have the dozen includes in the pch file of the scratchpad project.) Shouldn't it be easy to "maintain" this "subsystem" separately and so on? I'm afraid I know nothing about this: if the answer is obvious, hit me over the head and let me know. Thank you for any info on this !

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• Explaining a Ruby code snippet

  - by Michael Foukarakis

  I'm in that uncomfortable position again, where somebody has left me with a code snippet in a language I don't know and I have to maintain it. While I haven't introduced Ruby to myself some parts of it are quite simple, but I'd like to hear your explanations nonetheless. Here goes: words = File.open("lengths.txt") {|f| f.read }.split # read all lines of a file in 'words'? values = Array.new(0) words.each { |value| values << value.to_i } # looked this one up, it's supposed to convert to an array of integers, right? values.sort! values.uniq! diffs = Array.new(0) # this looks unused, unless I'm missing something obvious sum = 0 s = 0 # another unused variable # this looks like it's computing the sum of differences between successive # elements, but that sum also remains unused, or does it? values.each_index { |index| if index.to_i < values.length-1 then sum += values.at(index.to_i + 1) - values.at(index.to_i) end } # could you also explain the syntax here? puts "delta has the value of\n" # this will eventually print the minimum of the original values divided by 2 puts values.at(0) / 2 The above script was supposed to figure out the average of the differences between every two successive elements (integers, essentially) in a list. Am I right in saying this is nowhere near what it actually does, or am I missing something fundamental, which is likely considering I have no Ruby knowledge?

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• Android - Turn off display without triggering sleep/lock screen - Turn on with Touchscreen

  - by NebulaSleuth

  I have been trying to find a way to turn off the display, and wake up from the user touching the touch screen. The device is in an embedded environment where the device is a tablet and the user does not have access to anything except the touch screen (no buttons at all). It is connected to power so the battery won't be a problem, but when I detect no activity I want to turn off the screen so it isn't staring them in the face all day and doesn't reduce the life the LCD backlight. I maintain a wakelock permanently and decide when to sleep myself. The problem is that when I turn off the screen using : WindowManager.LayoutParams params = getWindow().getAttributes(); params.screenBrightness = 0; getWindow().setAttributes(params); The activity gets paused and stopped. And the unit does not respond to a touch to wake it up. You need to press the power button. At that point the "slide to unlock" shows up. I want to turn off the display, and then stay running so I can detect a touch screen event and turn the display back on. I also tried turning the display to a brightness of 0.1, which works on some devices, but the device I need it to work on, only "dims" the display. I also tried this: // First Remove my FULL wakelock //then aquire a partial wake lock (which should turn off the display) PowerManager.WakeLock wl = manager.newWakeLock(PowerManager.PARTIAL_WAKE_LOCK, "Your Tag"); wl.acquire(); however this method does not turn off the display.

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• How to store arbitrary data for some HTML tags

  - by nickf

  I'm making a page which has some interaction provided by javascript. Just as an example: links which send an AJAX request to get the content of articles and then display that data in a div. Obviously in this example, I need each link to store an extra bit of information: the id of the article. The way I've been handling it in case was to put that information in the href link this: <a class="article" href="#5"> I then use jQuery to find the a.article elements and attach the appropriate event handler. (don't get too hung up on the usability or semantics here, it's just an example) Anyway, this method works, but it smells a bit, and isn't extensible at all (what happens if the click function has more than one parameter? what if some of those parameters are optional?) The immediately obvious answer was to use attributes on the element. I mean, that's what they're for, right? (Kind of). <a articleid="5" href="link/for/non-js-users.html"> In my recent question I asked if this method was valid, and it turns out that short of defining my own DTD (I don't), then no, it's not valid or reliable. A common response was to put the data into the class attribute (though that might have been because of my poorly-chosen example), but to me, this smells even more. Yes it's technically valid, but it's not a great solution. Another method I'd used in the past was to actually generate some JS and insert it into the page in a <script> tag, creating a struct which would associate with the object. var myData = { link0 : { articleId : 5, target : '#showMessage' // etc... }, link1 : { articleId : 13 } }; <a href="..." id="link0"> But this can be a real pain in butt to maintain and is generally just very messy. So, to get to the question, how do you store arbitrary pieces of information for HTML tags?

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• How to make a piece of WPF content take up the entire application window

  - by Bojin Li

  I'm working on an application that contains a number of content areas. I want to implement a behavior such that in response to user input, any of these content areas can be toggled to fit the entire application window, and optionally back to its original position again. I experimented with several approaches and none of them seem optimal for me. Here's what I tried to do: Use the ClipToBoundsProperty on the content I want to make "Full Screen": Doesn't work because only the CanvasPanel seems to fully respect this property. The application need to be localized so I would really like to avoid the CanvasPanel. Use a Grid and collapse the other content areas, such that only the one I want to see is visible, hence taking up the entire screen: This will probably work but doesn't seem easy to implement nor maintain. The "Full Screen" content area could be several levels deep, for example residing inside a Tabcontrol, so I would have to hide the tab headers too etc. Reconstruct the content area in a separate view and display it while hiding the rest: Seems easy enough to do with DataTemplates and my ViewModel objects, but any GUI/View only states are not preserved using this approach. Somehow "lift" the GUI/View I want to "Full Screen" into the separate view and display it while hiding the rest: I don't know how to do this or even if this is possible. Anyway if anyone knows a better approach I would love to know about it. Thanks a lot!

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• How can I use SQL Server's full text search across multiple rows at once?

  - by Morbo

  I'm trying to improve the search functionality on my web forums. I've got a table of posts, and each post has (among other less interesting things): PostID, a unique ID for the individual post. ThreadID, an ID of the thread the post belongs to. There can be any number of posts per thread. Text, because a forum would be really boring without it. I want to write an efficient query that will search the threads in the forum for a series of words, and it should return a hit for any ThreadID for which there are posts that include all of the search words. For example, let's say that thread 9 has post 1001 with the word "cat" in it, and also post 1027 with the word "hat" in it. I want a search for cat hat to return a hit for thread 9. This seems like a straightforward requirement, but I don't know of an efficient way to do it. Using the regular FREETEXT and CONTAINS capabilities for N'cat AND hat' won't return any hits in the above example because the words exist in different posts, even though those posts are in the same thread. (As far as I can tell, when using CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX I have to give it my index on the primary key PostID, and can't tell it to index all posts with the same ThreadID together.) The solution that I currently have in place works, but sucks: maintain a separate table that contains the entire concatenated post text of every thread, and make a full text index on THAT. I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require me to keep a duplicate copy of the entire text of every thread in my forums. Any ideas? Am I missing something obvious?

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• Binding Javascript Event Handlers to a an Ajax HTML Response?

  - by John

  Let's say I have the following HTML code <div id="outer"> <div id="inner">Hello World</div> </div> At the end of my HTML page, I use javascript to attach event handlers like so, document.getElementById('inner').onclick = function() {alert(this.innerHTML);} document.getElementById('outer').onclick = function() { /* An Ajax Call where the response, which will be a string of HTML content, then goes into document.getElementById('outer').innerHTML */ document.getElementById('inner').onclick = function() {alert(this.innerHTML);} } In the above code, I am expecting <div id="inner">Hello World 2</div> to come back which requires me to re-attach the onclick event handler. This makes sense because the new response coming back is just a string, and I have to tell the browser that after converting to DOM, i also need some event handlers So my question is, is there a better way to manage event handlers on AJAX response that contains HTML content? I could use inline javascript within the html response, but then it prevents me from achieving non-intrusive javascript. So is there a way to achieve non-intrusive javascript and an efficient way to "maintain" event handlers of ajax html responses?

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• Allow login from another site

  - by tunmise fasipe

  I have web application where I store users' password and username. If you logon to this site, you can login with the password and username to have access to your profile. There is another option that requires you to login to my site from your site and have your profile within your site. This is because you might already have a site that your clients know you with. This latter part is what I don't know to implement. I have these ideas: Have a fixed IFrame within your site to contain my site: but I am concerned about size/layout since different clients have different layout/size for their content section. I am thinking of how to maintain session too A webservice: I don't know how feasible this is since the Password and ID are on my server. You may have to send them back and forth. It means client would have to code with my API. But I am not just returning data, I have to show them a page that contains the profile details OpenID, Single-SignOn: Just guessing - but the authentication and data resides on my server. there is nothing to access on your side in this case Any other methods/better approach Examples: like login into facebook within my site and still be able to do post updates, receive notifications Facebook implement some of these with IFrame e.g. the Like button

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• Creating transparent PNG with exact RGBA values

  - by rrowland

  I'm color-coding a transparent image to be read programatically. However, the image seems to be getting compressed and my code is reading color values other than the ones I mean to pass it. Concept This is the output I get, exporting as PNG-24. I programatically check each pixel for one of the six colors I use in creating the image: 0x00000F 0x0000F0 0x000F00 0x00F000 0x0F0000 0xF00000 Each color represents a different texture to apply. Top right (0x00000F) will pull texture from the tile to its top right and blend it at a ratio equal to the opacity of the pixel. The end goal is to create a hex tiled grid with differing textures that blend smoothly. What's happening It seems that when converting to PNG, Photoshop will change the RGBA to make it smoother, or just to help compression size. Parts that should be 250 red range anywhere from 150 to 255. Question Whether using PNG or another web-compatible format, I need to be able to save these pixel values, essentially instructions, loss-less and still maintain transparency. Is this possible in any format or will I need to re-think my approach?

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• Alert Box Methods

  - by Vecta

  I just need a little advice on what may be the best method for handling my situation. I'm in need of placing three buttons in the sidebar of the website I maintain. The website is massive and hard to handle. Currently, it's all HTML files (there are over 10,000 of them believe it or not). We're transitioning to a database website so I don't want to make any sweeping changes that are site-wide, as they may just be scrapped in our re-design process in coming months. However, these buttons are for an application process. When you click on them, an alert box will need to pop up to give you a bit of information and they either allow you to cancel the action or proceed. The buttons are currently located in the left nav which is included on every page of the website. Would it be possible to accomplish this using JS or jQuery? I'd be unable to easily add scripts into the tags on all of the applicable pages, but I'd like to avoid the browser driven "http://www...Says: blah blah" message if possible. Any insight is greatly appreciated! Thank you!

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• jQuery - if div height over 'x', show only content within the visible div, add an image and scroll u

  - by Nicki

  Apologies, I'm very new to jQuery. I am trying to apply jQuery to a div which could contain any number of p tags of varying length or none at all. Depending on the assembled p's this div needs to maintain a height of 45px. If the p's contained therein push the div to be higher than 45px then I need to add an anchor image which users can click allowing the div to slide up and reveal the div's contents. I've browsed the plugins but can't find anything to cater for this. <div class="SummaryExtras"> <h3><span>h3 Title</span></h3> <div> <p class="Extra">text</p> <p class="Extra">text</p> <p class="Extra">text</p> <p class="Extra">text</p> <p class="Extra">text</p> </div> <div class="SummaryExtrasBottom"></div> </div>

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• using IntentExatras with Alarm Manager

  - by Ashwin

  I want to know if this code will work(I cannot try it out right now. Moreover, I have a few doubts that have to be cleared). Intent intent = new Intent(context, AlarmReceiver.class); intent.putExtra("user",global.getUsername()); intent.puExtra("password",global.getPassword); PendingIntent sender = PendingIntent.getBroadcast(context, 192837, intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT); // Get the AlarmManager service Log.v("inside log_run", "new service started"); AlarmManager am = (AlarmManager) getSystemService(ALARM_SERVICE); am.setRepeating(AlarmManager.RTC_WAKEUP, IMMEDIATELY,60000,sender); finish(); As you can see, this code starts an AlarmManager with setRepeating(). If you see the intent(actually the pending intent) passed on to the BroadcastReceiver, there are two extras that are passed on. These are global variables that live as long as the Application is running. But this AlarmManager is meant to be run in the background (that is application will be alive only for the first few calls of the o fthe alrmamanager to the broadcast recevier) My Question Will AlarmManager make a copy of the global variables(the username and password) and maintain this copy to be passed along with the intent? Because, these values will be used in the broadcast receiver.

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• Objective C : UIButton image with NSArray in a random order

  - by Sarah

  Brief Idea about the flow : I have say minimum 1 and maximum 18 records in my database with a text and an image from which I have to fetch images and place any 3 of the same randomly to 3 UIButtons among which one image should match with my question. i.e. 1 is the answer and other 2 are the distractors. For Example : Question is : where is Apple? Now among the bunch of images, I want to place any 3 images on the 3 UIButtons(1 answer i.e. An Apple and 2 distractors) in a random order and on selecting the UIButton it should prompt me if it's a right answer or not. I am implementing below code for placing the UIImages in a random order : -(void) placeImages { NSMutableArray *images = [NSMutableArray arrayWithArray:arrImg]; NSArray *buttons = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:btn1,btn2,btn3, nil]; for (UIButton *btn in buttons) { int randomIndex= random() % images.count; UIImage *img = [images objectAtIndex:randomIndex]; [btn setImage:img forState:UIControlStateNormal]; [images removeObjectAtIndex:randomIndex]; } } But I am stuck at a point that how should I get 1 UIButton image with an answer and other as distractors also that how should i maintain the index of the image from the NSArray? Kindly guide me. Thank you.

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• How to control div on hover:?

  - by AAA

  I found a way to change the background color of a menu option upon hover. However, when you hover an option, it takes up some wide space that moves all the other options to the right, its sort of annoying, i want to maintain a consistent space, so if i hover, only the color should change, not the option moving to the right. Sort of the way facebook has its menu options. Below is the code: <div id="menu"> <a href="/hello" id="option">home</a> <a href="/hello" id="option">profile</a> <a href="/hello" id="option">account</a> <a href="/hello" id="option">settings</a> <a href="/hello" id="option">extra</a> <a href="/hello" id="option">logout</a> </div> CSS: div#menu { margin-left: 630px; margin-top:-20px; } option { margin-left: 20px; } #option:hover{ background: #3F2327; padding: 10px; }

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• Windows 2008 and wrong BPL loading [SOLVED]

  - by Beto Neto

  I have an application builded with Run-time Packages. When the executable starts it auto loads the required packages (.bpl). Recently we has installed an Windows 2008 R2 server to use as Terminal Services. We maintain some old compiled versions of our application in different paths, like this: c:\app\version_1\common.bpl c:\app\version_1\app.exe c:\app\version_2\common.bpl c:\app\version_2\app.exe Common.bpl is the a run-time package what app.exe depends on. THE PROBLEM: I start "c:\app\version_2\app.exe" and it loads "c:\app\version_2\common.bpl". When I start the "c:\app\version_1\app.exe" it loads the WRONG bpl (from version_2). The path "c:\app\version_2\" isn't at the system search path. At Windows2003 server this problem doesn't occurs. What can I do to solve this? Thanks! I have downloaded the Process Explorer (microsoft sysinternals), and checked the loaded modules of each executable, all they are correct! But I noticed another problem. After start the second version, an entry-not-found-error occurs, telling me what a initialization entry point, of an unit what only exists in one of the versions, could not be found. Something is very strange. The ProcessExplorer is telling me that the process is loading the correct modoles, but when they are running this seems not be happening. Seems the applications are sharing the loaded modules. SOLVED There was a MouseHook using FindVCLWindow, this was generating the AV. Sorry about inconvenience guys, and thanks!

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• Placing elements (panels) within a wx.GridBagSizer

  - by JHarris

  I'm using a gridbagsizer to place two panels within a frame. control_panel = wx.Panel(self, id=ID_CONTROL_PANEL) main_panel = wx.Panel(self, id=ID_MAIN_PANEL) frame_sizer = wx.GridBagSizer(1, 1) frame_sizer.Add(control_panel, (0, 0), (2, 5), flag=wx.EXPAND) frame_sizer.Add(main_panel, (2, 0), (5, 5), flag=wx.EXPAND) frame_sizer.AddGrowableRow(0) frame_sizer.AddGrowableCol(0) self.SetSizer(frame_sizer) I want the control_panel to be above the main_panel (as you can see above). However this is the output I get: I don't know why the top panel is so much larger than the bottom panel, when I've specified the opposite. (2, 5) for the top and (5, 5) for the bottom. It also has a strange behaviour when I resize it smaller, it basically gives me what I want (see image below), but I don't know how to maintain the ratio when I make it larger again. However when you start resizing larger (even by a small amount) you can see (below) the shapes and ratio change dramatically in the other direction (with the bottom becoming much smaller and the top much larger). Still trying to learn this sizers and can't really find this problem with any of the examples I've seen. Also tried experimenting with all the parameters and doing some tests and I can't figure out what's going on here. Any help would be much appreciated.

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL on Linux (Kubuntu)

  - by Dave Jarvis

  Storyline Trying to migrate a database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. All the documentation I have read covers, in great detail, how to migrate the structure. I have found very little documentation on migrating the data. The schema has 13 tables (which have been migrated successfully) and 9 GB of data. MySQL version: 5.1.x PostgreSQL version: 8.4.x I want to use the R programming language to analyze the data using SQL select statements; PostgreSQL has PL/R, but MySQL has nothing (as far as I can tell). A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... Create the database location (/var has insufficient space; also dislike having the PostgreSQL version number everywhere -- upgrading would break scripts!): sudo mkdir -p /home/postgres/main sudo cp -Rp /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main /home/postgres sudo chown -R postgres.postgres /home/postgres sudo chmod -R 700 /home/postgres sudo usermod -d /home/postgres/ postgres All good to here. Next, restart the server and configure the database using these installation instructions: sudo apt-get install postgresql pgadmin3 sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 stop sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/postgresql.conf Change data_directory to /home/postgres/main sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.4 start sudo -u postgres psql postgres \password postgres sudo -u postgres createdb climate pgadmin3 Use pgadmin3 to configure the database and create a schema. A New Hope The episode began in a remote shell known as bash, with both databases running, and the installation of a command with a most unusual logo: SQL Fairy. perl Makefile.PL sudo make install sudo apt-get install perl-doc (strangely, it is not called perldoc) perldoc SQL::Translator::Manual Extract a PostgreSQL-friendly DDL and all the MySQL data: sqlt -f DBI --dsn dbi:mysql:climate --db-user user --db-password password -t PostgreSQL > climate-pg-ddl.sql mysqldump --skip-add-locks --complete-insert --no-create-db --no-create-info --quick --result-file="climate-my.sql" --databases climate --skip-comments -u root -p The Database Strikes Back Recreate the structure in PostgreSQL as follows: pgadmin3 (switch to it) Click the Execute arbitrary SQL queries icon Open climate-pg-ddl.sql Search for TABLE " replace with TABLE climate." (insert the schema name climate) Search for on " replace with on climate." (insert the schema name climate) Press F5 to execute This results in: Query returned successfully with no result in 122 ms. Replies of the Jedi At this point I am stumped. Where do I go from here (what are the steps) to convert climate-my.sql to climate-pg.sql so that they can be executed against PostgreSQL? How to I make sure the indexes are copied over correctly (to maintain referential integrity; I don't have constraints at the moment to ease the transition)? How do I ensure that adding new rows in PostgreSQL will start enumerating from the index of the last row inserted (and not conflict with an existing primary key from the sequence)? Resources A fair bit of information was needed to get this far: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostgreSQL http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/site-mysql-postgresql-1 http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Converting_from_other_Databases_to_PostgreSQL#MySQL http://pgfoundry.org/frs/shownotes.php?release_id=810 http://sqlfairy.sourceforge.net/ Thank you!

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• How to set up a mini call center?

  - by Ralph

  I'm trying to figure out how to set up a miniature call center for a small business. Like, for 1-4 people to take calls, but hopefully expandable to more. We want to accept nation-wide calls, and then I guess distribute the calls among the available agents. If no one is available, I guess it should either put them in a queue and play some annoying music for them, or forward to call to an agent who has least-recently taken a call who can then quickly answer and say "please hold" until they're done their call. We want to have one phone number that customers can call. I guess we then need some kind of ACD system which would take each call and forward it to an agent based on some algorithm? Then we would need to purchase a separate phone line for each agent, plus one just for the distributor? Or do we need several "extra" lines to maintain a queue (one for each customer waiting too)? This "ACD" thing, is it just a device that you would plug a phone line into (or several?), and maybe connect to a computer, aided by some software? Or is a subscription thing that I would need from my local telephone provider? Next, the business we're running, the callers will be repeat customers. It would be helpful to automatically pull up their profile based on the incoming number. The "software" our agents will be running will just be a website where they can log in (preferably from home) and then enter some information they would obtain through the call. So, the system would have to somehow interface with the website if possible. If not, we'll just have to ask each customer for an identifier (phone number, username, customer number, or something). Is this possible? I guess each computer would need a device that the call would pass through, and then if I can somehow hook into that, then I can write some software that will interface with the site. So, where do I start? What hardware do we need to buy? What subscriptions do we need? We were thinking this magicJack might help us in accepting long-distance calls for cheaper, but my understanding is that they provide you with some weird-looking number, is there a way we could "mask" it with our toll-free number? And then pass the incoming calls through the distributor system, which would then get passed to the call-accepting device which would both allow an agent to answer the call and have a software hook? (I realize this might be partially out of the scope of SU, but I wasn't sure where else to ask. It is about computer(-aided) hardware and software anyway.) P.S.: I don't need any of that "press 1 to talk to..." or "say xyz to..." junk. Just a straight-forward, connect-to-next-available-agent system.

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• How to allow local LAN access while connected to Cisco VPN?

  - by Ian Boyd

  How can I maintain local LAN access while connected to Cisco VPN? When connecting using Cisco VPN, the server has to ability to instruct the client to prevent local LAN access. Assuming this server-side option cannot be turned off, how can allow local LAN access while connected with a Cisco VPN client? I used to think it was simply a matter of routes being added that capture LAN traffic with a higher metric, for example: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 10.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 10.0.0.3 10.0.0.3 20 <--Local LAN 10.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 192.168.199.12 1 <--VPN Link And trying to delete the 10.0.x.x -> 192.168.199.12 route don't have any effect: >route delete 10.0.0.0 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 if 192.168.199.12 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 if 0x3 And while it still might simply be a routing issue, attempts to add or delete routes fail. At what level is Cisco VPN client driver doing what in the networking stack that takes overrides a local administrator's ability to administer their machine? The Cisco VPN client cannot be employing magic. It's still software running on my computer. What mechanism is it using to interfere with my machine's network? What happens when an IP/ICMP packet arrives on the network? Where in the networking stack is the packet getting eaten? See also No internet connection with Cisco VPN Cisco VPN Client interrupts connectivity to my LDAP server Cisco VPN stops Windows 7 Browsing How can I prohibit the creation of a route in Windows XP upon connection to Cisco VPN? Rerouting local LAN and Internet traffic when in VPN VPN Client "Allow local LAN Access" Allow Local LAN Access for VPN Clients on the VPN 3000 Concentrator Configuration Example LAN access gone when I connect to VPN Windows XP Documentation: Route Edit: Things I've not yet tried: >route delete 10.0.* Update: Since Cisco has abandoned their old client, in favor of AnyConnect (HTTP SSL based VPN), this question, unsolved, can be left as a relic of history. Going forward, we can try to solve the same problem with their new client.

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• GRUB 2 freezing at OS selection screen, what could be the cause?

  - by Michael Kjörling

  Mains power is somewhat unreliable where I live, so every now and then, the computer gets rebooted when the PSU can't maintain proper voltage during a brown-out or momentary black-out. It's happened a few times recently that when power is restored, the BIOS POST completes successfully, GRUB starts to load and then freezes. I've seen this at the Welcome to GRUB! message, but it seems to happen more often just past the switch to the graphical OS list. At this point, the computer will not respond to anything (arrow keys, control commands, Ctrl+Alt+Del, ...) - it simply sits there displaying this image, seemingly doing nothing more. At that point, turning the computer off using the power button and letting it sit for a while (cooling down?) has allowed it to boot successfully. Turning the computer off and immediately back on seems to give the same result (successful POST then freeze in GRUB). This behavior began recently, although does not seem to be directly correlated with my hard disk woes (although it may be relevant that GRUB resides on that physical disk, I don't know). Once the computer has booted, it runs without a hitch. I know that a "proper" solution would be to invest in a UPS, but what might be causing behavior like this? I was thinking in terms of perhaps the CPU shutting down as a thermal control measure, but if that was the cause then wouldn't I see similar freezes during use (which I do not)? What else could cause freezes apparently closely but not perfectly related to the BIOS handover from POST to OS bootloader? The BIOS settings are to reset to previous power status after a power loss. Since the PC in question is almost always turned on, this means restore to full power status. I have no expansion cards installed that make any BIOS extensions known by screen output during the boot process, at least, but I do have a few expansion cards installed. Haven't made any changes in that regard in a long time, now. I haven't touched GRUB itself for a long time, whether configuration or binaries, so I don't think that's the problem. Also, it doesn't really make sense that a bug in GRUB would manifest itself only once in a blue moon but significantly more often after a power failure.

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