Second Place
$25,000

Judging

The judging panel awarded this application first place because:

• the judges were impressed with the level of functionality and performance achieved in only 5 man days.
• the entry leveraged SOA principles, and in the words of one judge, truly illustrated rapid development of Rich Internet Applications leveraging a powerful services interface on the backend.

5MD gTop Application

5MD gTop is a cut down version of Documentum Webtop, built with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), so we called it gTop

In the words of the development team, "From our point of view, D6 is all about EAI. We’re constantly working with developers around the globe within the investment bank that need to integrate with our content servers. Removing the need for the DFC greatly simplifies application integration and makes our lives easier. We hope to use our 5MD application to demo to other development teams what can be done quickly leveraging D6 and the new DFS."

About the Developers

• Rob Cleghorn - Heads up the ECM development team for BNP Paribas
• Andrew Mcallister - Senior developer for the EMC team at BNP Paribas
• Alexandre Alvarez - Technical lead for the EMC team at BNP Paribas
• Simon Green - Documentum developer @ BNP Paribas
• James Maughan - Consultant/developer working for BNP Paribas

More on the Team BNP Paribas

Overview

There are two clear areas of the application, the front end which is written in Java using the Google Web Toolkit. And the back end which is a set of servlets and helper classes of which our only current implementation is supported by DFS.

Our team were all keen to get involved in and learn about both areas, and with our limited time scales we came up with an initial list of tasks of what needed to happen in order.

• Get the development environment up and running
• List the components and functionality we’d like to include in order of priority, realizing the bottom of the list probably won’t get done
• Put together the basic page layout
• Define how best to decouple the presentation layer
• Get a slice of functionality running, as an example for everyone
• Work through the list of components we’d like to see in the time we have
• Test, bundle and submit

The reality was almost as we planned, but with a few extra steps; 1a: Panic, etc.

Technical Highlights

• Used the Documentum provided Java APIs as an easy-to-use wrapper for the web service calls. The services are arranged in logical, intuitive packages
• Pure AJAX application, based on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and GWT RPC
• Pure Java solution with CSS. No HTML, JSP or JavaScript development. Makes it easy to manage and maintain the application source code.
• Decoupled the presentation layer with the use of interfaces and implementation classes, which created a clean separation of the front end application and modular support components. This meant that we were all able to develop in parallel. It also allowed other backend implementations to be substituted without any need to change the front end application.

Benefits

At our investment bank we have a large number of different development teams all working on different applications and projects. Obviously there is a lot of complex work required to integrate all these applications as they share data and trigger behaviour across a variety of technology platforms. When applications need to talk to the Documentum severs and services, our Documentum specialist team usually get involved with either writing the DFC implementation or guiding the application team through installation of the DFC and how best to use it.

When we start using Documentum 6 in the bank the removal of the DFC will greatly reduce the complexity of our installation process and offer pure web services interface straight in to our content server and our services.

The 5MD gTop application will be our example application where best practices are demonstrated. It shows clean examples using the DFS and we are also planning a pure web services implementation of the back end. This will allow applications that currently utilise web services, to easily integrate with our services.

The fact this only took us 5 man days will help us reinforce the message of just how easy this technology is to use.

Team BNP Paribas

Rob Cleghorn - Initially starting in software development in the early 90s, Rob got involved with Documentum 7 years ago working as a consultant in New Zealand and the UK. This and his experience in J2EE and Web technologies has led him into technical architecture and project management. He now heads up the ECM development team for BNP Paribas.

Andrew Mcallister - Andrew grew up in the beautiful country of New Zealand. Ever since he was a little boy he knew he wanted to be a fireman or a document management consultant, and after a little investigation he found that Documentum™ was safer than a burning building. Andrew moved to London in 2004, and has since been working as a software engineering consultant on a variety of java based projects, including several Documentum Webtop implementations. He is currently a senior developer for the EMC team at BNP Paribas.

Alexandre Alvarez - Alex has been designing Documentum-based systems during the past 5 years for both the finance and automotive industries. His main interests include Agile Methodologies and Service Based Architectures. He is currently a technical lead for the EMC team at BNP Paribas.

Simon Green - Simon has almost 10 years experience working with the Documentum product set, working for many different Documentum customers, including 2 years as a consultant for EMC Australia. He has maintained a very technical bias to his roles, which range from analytical and development work in application or integration projects, to more infrastructural projects such as data migration and product upgrades. He is currently at BNP Paribas as a Documentum developer.

James Maughan - James has been working with Documentum products for the past 6 years. During this time he has help deliver several major systems for various international clients His roles have varied from analyst, designer, developer, tester to team leader. This exposure to several phases of the project lifecycle at different levels in the team structure has helped him foster an understanding of the issues typically faced by an IT project. He is an enthusiast for new technology and is always striving to learn from his fellow team members. He is currently a consultant/developer working for BNP Paribas.

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