Barclays

Barclays PLC is one of the World’s leading financial institutions with over 27 million customers and clients in more than 50 countries. A staff count in excess of 127,000 serve Barclay’s customers. In 2003, Barclays identified the need for a mapping tool which would allow all Intranet users to access operational and location information about assets, such as branches and Automated Teller Machines (ATMs).

Choosing a supplier

Dotted Eyes were chosen to supply a browser based means of giving users access to asset information over the corporate Intranet. This was built using the ResponseMX Developer Framework. Dotted Eyes was also commissioned to supply a wide range of value-added digital mapping data and consultancy services in addition to system administration training and support. The datasets are used for various marketing and research activities within the business. Dotted Eyes were chosen to provide these services because during a long standing relationship with Barclays they had clearly demonstrated that they understood their business.

Why ResponseMX

For security reasons, Barclays required a system which would be fully hosted on their own servers and deployed to users on a company Intranet, rather than being held on a third party’s servers;
Barclays required high levels of uptime;
Barclays were keen to implement an application which was highly customisable. ResponseMX is easy to configure, and Dotted Eyes runs a ResponseMX User Forum to keep developers up to date with new applications and additional functionality within the software platform;
Barclays were impressed by the intuitive interface which makes it easy for users to explore data interactively.

Result

The application has been accessible by thousands of staff across the UK in the 3 years since it went live. It has performed reliably, with no downtime.

Technical overview

ResponseMX’s mapping engine runs as a service, accessible from the web using simple HTTP requests. The server-side application utilises Open Source technologies from Apache. The application runs within Apache's Tomcat servlet container, which handles the transmission of data over HTTP. Apache's Struts framework is used as a basis for the Middleware component, which processes the HTTP requests and translates those requests into calls on the ResponseMX API. Building ResponseMX upon the Struts framework allows the application to follow the Model-View-Controller design pattern.

The appropriate ResponseMX business logic is called by Struts which contains Dotted Eyes’ value added components.The ResponseMX platform provides an interface to multiple mapping engines.

The client-side application is built using Flash for a rich and highly responsive user experience. The Flash client communicates with the server using XML formatted messages. The information passed in these messages is compact, typically under 1 KB, which minimises the bandwidth required. Where it is necessary to pass large data structures ResponseMX switches the format of the message from XML to JSON, a more lightweight data-interchange format that compacts the information into a smaller message. This increases the efficiency with which the client application can communicate with the server, providing a more responsive application.

Next steps

View Dotted Eyes' web mapping or data products; alternatively, access more case studies.