Cloud Amber Traffic Management, Traffic Alerts and UTMC.

Technology

Cloud Amber embrace industry best practice, chosing proven and reliable systems, standards & protocols and work with key strategic partners. This means Cloud Amber can build the best possible system, with technology that works, delivering key customer requirements with reduced management, risk and support.

We do not subscribe to the ‘not invented here’ camp and will work with any specialist in any field where they can bring their unique skills in to play. It is more important to us that the systems integrate, are reliable, do what they say on the tin, provide the flexibility to allow innovation and above all else provide the customer and end user with a system they want to use.

An example of our philosophy is the use of Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). If today the standards group was to define a set of standards to exchange data objects, Cloud Amber believe the use of XML and SOAP would feature more heavily. However the standard is in CORBA, it works, does its job well and Cloud Amber have integrated CORBA in to our systems and data exchange protocols. We have used open source to help us integrate CORBA in to a Microsoft .NET environment and provide the system interoperability we desire. As a result all of our products are UTMC compliant to version two of the specification. In addition Cloud Amber are already working with the UTMC technical workgroup and other suppliers to build on CORBA and provide XML based protocols for interoperability with other systems more easily.

Microsoft Server 2008

Microsoft Server 2008 will be used throughout our server infrastructure for a number of key reasons.

Easy to Deploy, Manage, and Use

- Secure Connected Infrastructure

- Enterprise-Class Reliability, Availability, Scalability, and Performance

- Lower TCO Through Consolidation and the Latest Technology

- Create Dynamic Intranet and Internet Web Sites

- Fast Development with Integrated Application Server

- Easy to Find, Share, and Reuse XML Web Services

Microsoft .NET & ASP.NET

Cloud Amber use Microsoft’s .NET framework for a number of key reasons, namely interoperability, usability and reliability.

Cloud Amber work with a number of best of breed partners and in order for integration to be successful, we want to be able to choose the best partners, systems, and applications quickly and flexibly without being limited by system compatibility issues.

By using the Internet to enable software applications to more easily work together, Microsoft .NET will allow us easier integration within and among our partners without being locked in to these arrangements.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Cloud Amber will be using Microsoft SQL Server as the database engine to power the databases needed for the project. There are a number of reasons for this and they are highlighted below.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is a database platform for large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing, and e-commerce applications; it is also a business intelligence platform for data integration, analysis, and reporting solutions.

The Database Engine is the core service for storing, processing, and securing data. The Database Engine provides controlled access and rapid transaction processing to meet the requirements of the most demanding data consuming applications.

Cloud Amber will use the Database Engine to create relational databases for online transaction processing or online analytical processing data. This includes creating tables for storing data, and database objects such as indexes, views, and stored procedures for viewing, managing, and securing data. We will use SQL Server Management Studio to manage the database objects, and SQL Server Profiler for capturing server events.

VeriSign

Cloud Amber has chosen VeriSign to provide the SSL Certificates for the dissemination channels to protect users personal information and passwords. VeriSign have rigorous authentication practices for online identity assurance and secures more than 500,000 Web servers worldwide, more than any other Certificate Authority. They provide 128- or 256-bit encryption to over 99.9% of Web site visitors, including the tens of millions who use certain older versions of Windows and Internet Explorer.

It is a trusted brand used by companies, governments and public institutions worldwide to secure their sites and protect their brands. For example, the world’s 40 largest banks and 93% of Fortune 500 companies use VeriSign SSL Certificates.

Open Source

Cloud Amber is a firm believer of the open source movement. Like the open standards for system interoperability, an open and free software market has spawned products that would otherwise be uneconomic to produce and driven some of the incumbent market players to raise their game. The technology they employ is usually cutting edge and sometimes bleeding edge where the internet community can try out concepts and designs without always looking at the ‘bottom line’ like most commercial organisations.

Some of the lesser positive elements of the movement include projects with questionable quality standards and documentation that is either difficult for anyone other than a die hard expert or it is non existent.

Cloud Amber carefully select the software components and libraries used. When we have chosen the library Cloud Amber go through our own testing and acceptance of the software to make sure it meets or exceeds our own quality standard. We also look for the design quality, the ease of integration, the scaling and capacity issues together with security loop holes and other concerns.

Once accepted, Cloud Amber continually check and monitor the online forums and communities, post our own suggestions, contribute bug fixes and simple feature upgrades that we find and improve. In addition to this Cloud Amber also contribute financially to the project each time we use the software in a production environment.

Cloud Amber feel that using these set of strategies, we can get the best from the community and assist in developing the software for everyone’s benefit. Cloud Amber will be using a number of open source libraries to deliver the Yorkshire Voyager system. The projects are summarised below:

IIOP.NET

IIOP.NET is an open source CORBA Library for the Microsoft .NET framework. IIOP.NET allows a seamless interoperation between .NET, CORBA and J2EE distributed objects. This is done by incorporating CORBA/IIOP support into .NET, leveraging the remoting framework.

IIOP.NET is released under the LGPL license.

IIOP.NET was born on May, 2 2003, and grew from a small experimental project to a stable and useful application, mostly thank to the great feedback and dedication of the growing user's community.

Some of the advantages of the library include:

- Tight coupling between distributed objects in .NET, CORBA and J2EE.

- Components on each platform can act in either client or server role.

- Existing servers can be used unmodified, without wrapping code or adapters.

- Extensive coverage of CORBA/.NET type mappings.

- Native integration in the .NET framework.

- IIOP.NET is directly based on the standard remoting infrastructure.

- Confirmed compatibility with SUN JDK, MICO, TAO, OmniORB, JacORB, IBM Websphere, JBoss, BEA Weblogic, Borland Enterprise Server, Microsoft .NET and Mono.

Open Layers

OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript based mapping library. OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD Licence.

OpenLayers is a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference -- OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.

OpenLayers is becoming a project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

Furthermore, OpenLayers implements industry-standard methods for geographic data access, such as the OpenGIS Consortium's Web Mapping Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) protocols. Under the hood, OpenLayers is written in object-oriented JavaScript, using components from Prototype.js and the Rico library. The OpenLayers code base already has hundreds of unit tests, via the Test.AnotherWay framework.

As a framework, OpenLayers is intended to separate map tools from map data so that all the tools can operate on all the data sources. This separation breaks the proprietary silos that earlier GIS revolutions have taught civilisation to avoid. The mapping revolution on the public Web should benefit from the experience of history.

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