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Zag, an Internet startup firm, partnered with Capital One, an auto-loan provider, to provide consumers with a simple way to obtain information about pricing and availability for new and used automobiles. The system is also designed to configure the new cars and arrange financing online. Zag developed a technology to support DriveOne.com, a new Capital One Web site, that was flexible and able to handle inventory management, configuration, pricing, call center, and customer relationship management. The solution was found in service-oriented architecture (SOA), which uses an abstracted and modular approach to design extensibility and adaptability into the system. Since Zag could not develop all the necessary applications within the timeframe imposed by Capital One, it acquired Autoland, a credit-union car-buying service. This meant that Zag also had to handle legacy issues. The firm adopted a composite application approach, but had to ensure that services were not duplicated. The Zag system consists of ten composite applications deployed on one of two platforms, .Net and Java. This means that the internal interactions in a composite application are native. The applications integrate via point-to-point connections, using SOAP, WSDL, REST, and AJAX. One of the advantages of using an AJAX approach is that it offloads processing to the client.
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Information Sources, Inc.
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