Web Application design solutions

[Brendon Woodford]

Hello everybody,
I am writing an application for a Travel company using hibernate, struts,jstl,oracle. It includes writing design and logic for Hotel Booking, Car rental, flight booking etc. These services are provided by the other registered companies.I am wondering as to how to design the application when my application wants to book a hotel suite in any of the registered hotels how will my application interact with that particular hotel's application and how will the hotel's application send me the confirmation response .

How do we integrate a payment gateway into our application how does the interaction take place.
I am using weblogic 8 server ,ant ,cvsnt as the other tools.

Thanks.Appreciate any suggestion put forward.
Brendon

[Christopher Nortje]

Hi Brendon,
Could you please elaborate:

How are you integrating with these providers, are these “hotel's application” Web Services?

What is your main concern, determining what service to call (selecting the correct provider)?

The payment mechanism depends on what service has been provided to you.

Not sure on what you are asking here.

[Brendon Woodford]

hi Christopher ,

How are you integrating with these providers, are these “hotel's application” Web Services?

The problem is the integration part. The hotel application is operational for their hotel management purpose If I want to integrate the travel application with that application how should I approach this.
The hotel application is in struts hibernate, so is the travel app.
Are the hotel-application people supposed to provide me with some api(web-interface) may be in webservices or jms.

In gist what are the ways of doing application integration, the design patterns involved?

What is your main concern, determining what service to call (selecting the correct provider)?

When a user wants to see the hotel suite available from the travel app page he should get the updated data from the hotel application. And when the user wants to book a suite in that particular hotel from the travel-app page he would fill in his data name, age, no of person to stay,date ,stay-duration etc. This data should be updated at the hotel app.
What is the way to do it?

The payment mechanism depends on what service has been provided to you.

If the user wants to make the payment from the travel app application using his credit card or debit card for the hotel suite booking what are parties involved here? Travel app ,hotel app and a payment gateway service provider. how will these integration take place. I believe the payment gateway company would provide some api for doing this. What is your opinion.

For integration what technologies are used? and which one is the best?

Thanks
Brendon

[Christopher Nortje]

The most common technology used to integrating with 3rd party applications is by Web Services.
Since the booking process is the core part of the hotel application, you would have them expose a secure web service with operations that allow you to perform a booking.
Example of these operations would be:
get all suites (retrieves a list of suites)
get availability (this allows you to identify the availability of a suite)
reserve suite (reserves a suite for customers, payment is unconfirmed)
confirm reservation (confirms that payment has been made)

Yes payment can be made via a payment provider; the provider would have a payment service that you should be able to use. The travel app is only acting as an intermediary, if commission to travel app is applicable you should negotiate the terms with the hotel and establish how commission would be payed back to travel app; either after the fact or whether the payment should be made to the travel app and then the travel app would pay the hotel.

design patterns involved

This highly depends on your interaction with other systems.

Things to think about: make sure that the customer has been authenticated, you don't want bookings to be made and customer not paying for the suite, leaving the hotel fully reserved with no one staying at the hotel.

[Brendon Woodford]

hi christopher,

Yes payment can be made via a payment provider; the provider would have a payment service that you should be able to use.

Can this service be used as webservice?
What are to technologies possibly used in general for online payment ?

Thanks
Brendon