My work onlineDuring the last year I was involved in creating the infrastructure for calculating insurances. It involved integrating a neat interface into a Content Management System, creating a simple data model for data kept on CMS side, connecting the CMS over a WebService to a generic integration system that is able to calculate a variety of plans based on the same input data. I also worked on that integration system, which contains a generic insurance data model (similar to the GDV or BiPRO ones, where we aim to get compliant with), a business process engine, which allows to do more than just calculation (for example cross selling) and an Enterprise Service Bus to connect with internal and external parties over a variety of protocols to do calculations and obtain further results.
For many people on Java projects such setup is reality, but always hidden from the general audience. It is enterprise stuff, meaning: nobody will ever see it. But this time I am lucky. The frontend is visible for everybody. Everybody can use my work to calculate a pension plan. This makes me happy. There were also others on the team, like my colleagues Nick and Rob, who worked mainly on the CMS side, producing the nice looking interface, so I have to share the praise :-)