Integrating Corporate Bank Ecosystems on a Wide Range of Devices

Guest Blog Post

Omniscient is a leading supplier of consulting services for Sencha Touch and Ext JS across Asia and the Americas. Our LIQUIDICE product is a Liquidity and Payments Management Application for corporate treasuries in large organizations, and we built it using Ext JS.

To survive in a highly volatile global economy, organizations need to monitor and manage their financial risks related to various internal and external (market) related factors, across their various entities and businesses.

Using LIQUIDICE, a Corporate Treasury can set up its global Bank Relationship Structure and configure the data connectivity channels with all of its banks. They can then monitor and manage their Global Cash and Liquidity positions across banks, currencies, accounts as well as business entities.

Why we built LIQUIDICE using Ext JS

Omniscient has been actively involved in developing web applications as part of its consulting services. During this period, we worked with a variety of HTML and JavaScript frameworks and libraries. We realized fairly quickly that Ext JS offers multiple advantages over other JavaScript frameworks, the most important being the excellent quality of the support that we get from Sencha.

• Support from Sencha – Having access to Sencha Support for Ext JS was one of the most important reasons for our choice. Lack of dependable support from other JavaScript frameworks is a serious drawback.
• Rich Component Library – The rich component library offered by Ext JS, which has helped us to build an unbeatable user experience for displaying and manipulating large quantities of complex data in the user interface.
• Cross Browser Compatibility – Since our customers use LIQUIDICE on a wide range of web browsers, this was an important factor for our choice. Ensuring Cross Browser on other JavaScript frameworks would have taken us at least 1.5 times more time and effort, both in terms of development and testing.
• Suitable for Large Development Teams (often distributed across time zones) – Ext JS allows us to standardize our application development processes and helps create reusable components and utilities, to deliver the best application performance across every device. Maintenance costs on our applications have gone down by 20% because every developer on our team understands the Ext JS framework.

To address the customer need of accessing their global liquidity information after office hours from their smartphones, we needed to extend application access to a wide range of iOS and Android-based mobile devices. We evaluated some of the popular frameworks and decided to use Sencha Touch because of our positive experience with Ext JS. Also, because Sencha Touch follows the same development paradigms as Ext JS, it helped us to minimize the learning curve for our development teams. The images below illustrate the mobile version of the application using the Sencha Touch framework.

Why we built LIQUIDICE Mobile using Sencha Touch

The key challenge was to provide a “ slice” of the application functionality and data on the smaller screen size by reusing the underlying code base, processing logic and security framework of the existing Ext JS enterprise application. Based on our experience with Ext JS, Sencha Touch was the logical choice for this development. Our team of Sencha Touch UX experts created a UI design that was a natural extension of the existing Ext JS application, with an added look-and-feel of a contemporary touch-based mobile application.

The following additional considerations helped validate our choice:

• Short Learning Curve – The team was already familiar with Ext JS and there was a very short learning curve for Sencha Touch.
• Look and Feel of Native Apps – Sencha Touch enables us to build applications that look and feel like native apps but have all of the benefits of HTML5. This allows us to use our existing development teams (that have experience and skills building desktop applications) to build mobile applications as well.
• Access to native features – The user experience of the Balance Notifications and Alerts functionality in LIQUIDICE was enhanced through the use of the native alert features of the smartphones. Sencha Touch provides direct support for Apache Cordova APIs, which makes accessing native sensors of mobile devices easy.
• Graphing capabilities – Support for visual representation of the liquidity information on the dashboard is a critical feature of LIQUIDICE, which is supported through the Sencha Touch graphing capabilities.
• One Code Base Across Multiple Devices – All our Corporate Treasury customers expect a uniform user experience across iPhone and Android based mobile devices. Using Sencha Touch and Apache Cordova allowed us to maintain a single code base across multiple devices and deliver the uniform cross platform UX they expected.

Omniscient’s customers are some of the largest ISVs in Payments, Securities Processing, Collateral Management and Treasury technologies. Our Sencha Development Services Team has been working with these customers on the following categories of development projects:

• Re-engineering JSP-based product UIs using Sencha Ext JS, by reusing the underlying business assets of the product
• Extending desktop browser-based Ext JS applications to tablet and mobile devices using Sencha Touch
• Building desktop browser-based Ext JS applications for Customer Administration and Configuration based on existing mobile applications

In the fast changing world of financial technologies, we use Ext JS and Sencha Touch for application development because our customers get the primary benefit of being able to leverage existing software product assets and phased investment in their product development.

We have also applied these benefits internally. Two architects from our consulting services team worked with our LIQUIDICE product team on the overall architecture and design of the LIQUIDICE mobile application to ensure that the design could scale up for massive amounts of anticipated data, and heavy concurrent user access demands.

Conclusion

Realizing the pervasiveness of the internet on all devices, companies are compelled to take a “universal access” strategy for their applications. The use of a unified framework involving Ext JS and Sencha Touch helps us to maximize the return on our investment with a single code base and talent pool. Our Consulting Services team is working with customers across the Americas and Asia on consulting and application development engagements using both of the Sencha frameworks. Our customers have experienced significant savings in time, effort and efficiency first by choosing to use Sencha frameworks (vis-à-vis other JavaScript or HTML 5 frameworks) and further by correctly implementing the Sencha framework to meet the functional requirements of their applications.