The Realtime Despatch system is designed around a modular, pluggable architecture, allowing highly tailored customer specific enhancements to be introduced around a solid, simple core system.
The software is highly configurable, allowing a wide range of different business requirements to be accomodated just by enabling the appropriate functionality and configuring the business logic in the appropriate scripting environment.
Physical Architecture
The Realtime Despatch application can be hosted on a local or remote webserver. E-commerce businesses can use the managed servers that already host their websites, ensuring that the back-end systems benefit from the same security and resilience at no additional cost.
Software Architecture
The Realtime Despatch software is built using an n-tier Java architecture, providing a scalable enterprise application that is platform independent, running on both Linux and Windows operating systems. Data is stored on a MySQL database. The application typically runs on an Apache Tomcat server.
Implementations that require high volume printing are supported using a local print server application that sits on the warehouse LAN, this is also platform independant.
The Realtime Despatch software is built using a highly modular software architecture, facilitated by Impala, a framework built specially for this purpose by Phil Zoio, the technical lead at Realtime Despatch.
A summary of the technologies used is shown below.
- Application - Java
- Application frameworks - Spring and Impala
- Database - MySQL
- Data transformations and configurable logic - Groovy
- Reports - Jasper Reports and iReport
- Printserver container - Jetty
Development and Support Environment
The Realtime Despatch software is built using leading open source application frameworks. This allows for rapid development of new features and consistency in the way that these features are implemented. A rigorous software development and build process is used, with a strong commitment to unit testing at all stages of the development cycle. Careful version management is used to allow for a rapid turnaround for bug fixes when these are required.
- Source control - Subversion
- Development environment - Eclipse
- Build and deployment - Ant
- Bug tracking and reporting - Redmine
- Server monitoring - Munin and Monit