A Financial Transaction Client Framework Based On RCP And XML UI

With the rapid economical development, the focus of competition in financial industry has switched to financial innovation and modern services based on advanced technologies. Many financial enterprises have been able to provide services with higher quality by service integration and become more competitive by providing new services. This trend drives the evolution of financial information systems. To support the changeful business requirement and protect IT investment of financial enterprises, the system must be extremely flexible. In such an application environment, neither of the traditional client/server (C/S) model and the browser/server (B/S) model is suitable to satisfy these demands.Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is an emerging middleware technology to build rich client applications. It provides the basic application infrastructure and an open-standard-based component model which enables developers to develop extensible client side applications and focus on domain specific functions instead of implementation details. XML UI is a user interface technology that declaratively describes user interface (UI) elements and their relationships with XML in a declarative way. It effectively separates UI description code and application logic implementation, which usually makes an application robust, easy to test/maintain. Additionally, XML UI also enables parallel development of UI and implementation logic, which dramatically speeds up the development process.To solve the problems in developing and maintaining transactional information systems in financial domain (e.g., inefficient to develop, difficult to deploy and update), this article proposes a plug-in based deploy/update pattern by leveraging Eclipse RCP technology and an XML based transaction user interface description language, TXUL. Base on these efforts, a financial transaction client framework, TRCP, is designed and implemented, which largely facilitates developing, deploying, updating new functional units and integrating existing ones. By developing front office systems based on TRCP framework, financial enterprises are enabled to develop extensible, maintain-easy client side of transaction information systems with lower costs.