Aphelion Consulting

The business challenge

At Aphelion Consulting, we needed to support FX trading, limit control and deal tracking for Nordic banks with a small engineering team. Each bank brought its own requirements and integrations. Maintaining a separate implementation for every customer would have multiplied the work of fixing, testing and releasing changes.

The architectural problem

The platform had to accommodate differences in customers, products and deployment models. Operators also needed to manage individual services during production operation. Every additional deployable process or manual release step would add work for the same team.

Modularity at runtime

We built modular monoliths on Eclipse 3.2 and OSGi. Components had explicit dependencies and managed lifecycles inside a shared application runtime. That let us compose applications around shared capabilities and customer needs while giving operators control over individual services.

Operators could stop and start individual services without necessarily restarting the whole application.

The architecture decisions

Make services visible to operators

We built administration tools to inspect and manage services inside running applications. Component lifecycles gave operators a way to intervene at service level when the application and its dependencies allowed it.

Share messaging across applications

We built a messaging layer using reliable multicast to exchange information among participating applications and services. Owning that layer also meant maintaining and operating it ourselves.

Manage desktop updates from servers

Installed desktop clients could receive updates from a server. That removed the need to manually repackage and reinstall the client for every correction across customer deployments.

Support browser and hosted delivery

We built a browser client with Google Web Toolkit alongside the desktop clients and server applications. We also established a hosted offering using the BT Radianz financial-services environment.

Delivery and results

Limit control

Limit Control and FX Deal Tracker for Svenska Handelsbanken.

FX trading

A trading platform supplied to Svenska Handelsbanken and Swedbank.

Hosted service

A deployment option in the BT Radianz environment.

These deliveries come from the firsthand project account. The account gives no verified team size, adoption figures or performance measurements.

The practical lesson

Through the lens of Policy vs Detail, the business requirement was to support several institutions, products and operating models from a common platform. Eclipse, OSGi, multicast and the client technologies were implementation choices. Their value came from the work they saved and the operational control they provided.

When designing a shared platform, trace one customer-specific change, one service restart and one client update. Count what the team must build, deploy or coordinate each time. Use that evidence to decide where modular boundaries and automation will earn their cost.