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the mutamers, external
agents, local umra companies, Ministry of Hajj, Ministry of Interior and
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Bab Al Umra is the biggest ASP provider with more
than 35% of the market and 1 million mutamer per year. This year, Bab Al Umra
will be expanding heavily gaining a bigger market share and probably they might
win the monopoly of the market.
BAB AL UMRA'S OBJECTIVES & REQUIREMENTS:
The
project is to develop an ASP application that will automate the total Umra
process. They have 1000 External agents around the world to enter mutamer data
using an offline application and/or from a web interface. All the transactions
of a mutamer from the minute he gets the visa number, arrival....will be
registered in the system. The project needs a B2C and B2B module to automate
the relation between hotels, travel agents, and Bab Al Umra. The system needs
to route the mutamers to the external agent in their countries and to route
travel agents to local Umra companies in Saudi Arabia.
 TECHNOLOGY
SOLUTIONS:
The application is actually a group of different applications
that work together in a coherent fashion to provide a complete a business
solution for the customer. Figure one displays the general design of Bab
Al-Umra application and the different components that make up the
system.
The application can be
divided to three logical layers called tiers:
1. Data access layer
2. Business layer
3. Presentation layer
 Data Access Layer
The data access layer is
composed of an oracle database that works as the storage media. To access data,
ADO .NET is used to provide a connection-oriented and disconnected-oriented
modes. OLEDB provider for oracle by Microsoft is used to provide fast access to
data and improve performance 200% more than any available provider in the
market.
Business Layer
The business layer uses three different kinds of technologies:
1. ASP .NET: that listens to user
requests using http and xml protocols (wire protocols. HTTP and XML are light,
weight protocols for data transfer in a heterogeneous and highly distributed
environment.
2. Web Services: This is a good
example of using loosely coupled components. The web service uses SOAP 1.0 as a
communication protocol (Simple Object Access Protocol). SOAP is the state of
the art technology for accessing objects remotely and exchange of messages.
3. ASP
pages: Active server pages use HTTP protocol as a communication protocol
with the client. Again IIS is the engine that runs those pages and returns the
response back to the user.
Presentation
Layer
This layer is responsible for rendering the data fed by the
presentation layer. XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Transformation), CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) are utilized to
return the data to the user in a presentable way. The web interface generates
http and requests and is handled by the ASP and ASP .NET handlers. The response
returned is a combination of HTTP, CSS, XSLT and XML. As for the desktop
application, it allows the client to send and receive data in XML format.
Security
Model
Since the Internet is the communication environment, security is a
major concern especially when a third party may expose data transferred. Two
levels of security checks are performed in the system: authentication and
authorization.
 Authentication:
Forms authentication is used
to validate the legibility of the user when using web browser to access any ASP
.NET page. Authenticated users are provided with an authentication ticket (in
an encrypted format) and sent with http request. For the web service, the
authentication is slightly different, credentials are sent with each request
since web services work in stateless fashion.
Data Processing
Unit
Data Processing Unit (DPU) is a windows service that act as a
gateway between two different database applications. The purpose of DPU is to
transfer data back and forth between two databases. DPU uses C# as programming
language and takes the advantage of interfaces and delegates to provide a
consistent interface for the application.
For more details about BAB
AL UMRA - YOUR GATEWAY TO UMRA, PLEASE GO TO :
www.babalumra.com |
Keyword: bab al umra |
