AXDC – Cauldwell and Hanselman – Legacy Financial Systems

Patrick Cauldwell and Scott Hanselman described their work to use XML schemas to formalize the interaction contract with the Voyager banking platform. They work for Corillian and claimed that 25% of the online banking activity in the US takes place on their system.

A memorable phrase from this talk was “Brady Bunch Wrox Books”. Oddly enough, the audience didn’t really seem to be familiar with the Brady Bunch and didn’t get the reference. Given that I recently worked with an intern who didn’t know that Charlie’s Angels was once a TV show, this is not too surprising.

“Get rid of code that monkeys can write.” This includes various types of validation that can be written in a declarative fashion and checked using Schematron, Babel (?) or Slang (?). This is expensive code and “not fun.” Automating it lets people focus on the more interesting parts.

For fun, they created a Tivo interface to their mainframe-based platform. This is used for UI development right now.