Solutions
The Sales Systems had to communicate with the MTS through online and batch process. It was necessary to develop an online communication and to provide maintenances to the batch process. For the online part it is necessary to designed a component to be linked to a PL/1 code that access Sales Systems.
The MTS is installed on two countries: Denmark and on USA. The MTS installation on Denmark receives automatic tax updates from Thomson Reuters Company. After the database has been updated with the new taxes an operator access the MTS console and dispatch a memory refresh to update the servers cache. This process is called cache synchronization. Although the MTS is a J2EE application that can run in a cluster, the internal cache system can only be refreshed between the servers on the same sub-net. Therefore, it could not be propagated from the Denmark environment over the USA environment. The DB2 instances were configured to propagate any changes from the Denmark database over the USA database. But the need to a local operator to dispatch a cache synchronization in USA had to be eliminated. To solve this problem, it was necessary to implement new application called Cache Synchronization (CS). It identifies the tax updates on the master MTS installation on Denmark then dispatch a cache synchronization command on the slave MTS console in USA only after the database has been synchronized. The dispatch of the synchronization command had to be done by simulating a user accessing the MTS console through the web. So, the component had to automatically navigate through the menus and issuing a cache synchronization command. I proved that the solution proposed by the architects would not work.
