For a customer with an interesting business we had to build a web application that has a RIA front end, displays data on maps, authenticates thru a web service that is connected with a back office customer subscription system, and that can handle any kind of data (for example shops, garages or whatever) as long as it conforms to a certain format. Depending on the specific dataset the application is configured in a different way and behaves differently. I call it a meta data driven application.

Anyway, taken all these aspects together, the building process has been an exciting adventure. From all frameworks we took the latest versions, and came up with the following tech stack: Spring 2.0, Acegi Security System 1.0, Dojo Javascript toolkit, Oracle (Ajax based) MapViewer 10.1.3.1 (released a month ago!) and Oracle 10g database. Spring formed the ecosystem for our application in which we plugged the Javascript presentation layer at the front end, and the unbreakable Oracle database at the back end. In the same container the Oracle MapViewer application is running. Ajax calls are made from the main application to mapViewer server in order to manage map standard behavior like panning More >