I had an opportunity to take a contract with Andersen Consulting for a JP Morgan project called Global Cash Management. This project was a very largely staffed (>100) major system for the bank. The architecture was Unix servers with C/C++ on the servers using IBM Encina (see below). This was my first exposure to service oriented architecture (SOA). Also, I was introduced to Unified Modeling Language (UML), which I would go on to be a big proponent of using in the future. I was brought on to this project because my expertise with Visual C++ and Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). I would mentor other developers in these technologies.

I’ve met many people on this project who I would go on to work with at other companies in the future and furthermore, become lifetime friends. Though the project ended when the product was completed, this project was a very intense learning experience that I will always reminisce. This project was staffed from contractors coming from South Africa, Pakistan, Eastern Europe, Canada, all over the U.S. and world.

Besides being a front-end developer, I also spent much of my time mentoring other developers on Visual C++, Microsoft Foundation Classes and the C++ language. Also, I would create client side proxies with TIDL/IDL interfaces to call the servers.

DCE/RPC, short for “Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls”, is the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). This system allows programmers to write distributed software as if it were all working on the same computer, without having to worry about the underlying network code.

Encina was a DCE-based^[1]transaction processing system developed by Transarc, which was later acquired by IBM.

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