4.9. Lessons Learned

HomeSide has applied valuable lessons learned during its initial foray into Web commerce by redesigning the business process to make online home mortgage lending more attractive to consumers. In so doing, it has adopted a strategy to maximize reuse of core business logic, while building a Web-commerce infrastructure that emphasizes flexibility, scalability, and adherence to open standards.

Specifically, HomeSide has made extensive use of J2EE technologies to design an application that is modular and easy to maintain. A master servlet coordinates the standard workflows used for data entry during the initial loan approval step, allowing this process to be maintained without affecting other back-end functions. Interaction between the Web application and the existing back-end loan origination systems is similarly modularized through encapsulation inside a session bean. In addition, the use of JNDI will facilitate application redeployment because it modularizes all user access to application services. Because of the transaction-intensive nature of home-mortgage lending processes, and the huge potential market for online mortgages, the modularity of the design based on the J2EE platform will allow HomeSide considerable flexibility when it comes to redeploying the application to support incoming traffic levels.

The use of standard XML transactions with the underwriting system results in an open process that can be applied by any of HomeSide's prospective business partners, who may wish to brand the process with their customers.

HomeSide looked to BEA WebLogic Server, both for its strong support of J2EE standards and because of BEA's expertise with transaction processing. “With WebLogic, we are assured of working with a tool that fully supports our transaction-intensive processes,” says Higdon.

For more on BEA, see http://www.bea.com. For the HomeSide Lending Web site, see http://www.homeside.com.