Nik Boyd @ CarsDirect.com

Sr. Technology Developer, 1999 December - 2003 February

CarsDirect.com
10567 Jefferson Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

CarsDirect.com is the first destination on the Internet where nationwide consumers can research, price, design, and order a new vehicle at home or the office.

• Designed and developed the message delivery failure and recovery mechanisms used when hosted applications can't deliver messages via JMS with MQ Series. Undelivered messages are encrypted and stored in the local file system of the application server. A periodic Java task scans the local file system for undelivered messages, decrypts them and attempts to resend them. Successfully delivered messages are then removed from the local file system.

• Designed and developed the SSL secured portions of the CarsDirect.com web site, including the collection and validation of customer contact information and consumer finance information using Java, JSP, JavaScript. Established a best practice for web application design using a layered MVC approach, with thin JSPs, a Controller session bean, and several View classes that wrapped the underlying persistent opportunity Model objects. The View classes mediate the collection and formatting of the customer data for the presentation layer. The JavaScript code validates the collected customer data in the client browser prior to posting submissions to the server.

• Designed and developed the enterprise opportunity data schema using Java, Castor, XML, XML Spy. The enterprise opportunity data schema includes all customer data shared by the various enterprise applications, including the web site, the customer relationship management system, and the consumer credit finance systems.

• Designed and developed a credit application submission framework using Java, Xalan, XSL, eXcelon Stylus. The framework creates lender-specific credit applications (in XML) from generic enterprise opportunity data (also XML) using XSLT.

• Designed and developed a web service availability monitor framework using Java. Web service availability monitors automatically detect both scheduled and unscheduled web service outages. During unscheduled outages, the monitors automatically detect the restoration of service availability.

• Designed and developed an automotive finance management web application using HTML, JavaScript, JSPs, Java. Features included the ability to edit consumer credit applications, view pending and decisioned credit application queues, view credit decision history and details, and view credit quotation history and details.

• Designed and developed Java class frameworks for managing consumer automotive credit products (loans and leases), including credit scoring and credit application submissions via web service and fax. The application submission framework uses the web service availability monitors (above) to determine whether to submit a credit application to a lender via web service or via fax.

• Designed and developed the credit evaluation subsystem using Java. Implemented the electronic data transfers using an XML codec to encode the credit applications and decode the credit evaluations. Implemented the XML codec using the Castor library. Used SSL to secure the credit data transfers. Implemented the SSL support using the JSSE (Java Secure Sockets Extension). Used client-side certificates for data exchange authentication. The XML data exchange protocol included SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).

• Designed and developed the credit decision subsystem using Java. Implemented the electronic data transfers using name - value pair codecs to encode credit applications as HTTP POSTs and decode credit decisions received as POSTed responses. Used SSL to secure the credit data transfers. Implemented the SSL support using the JSSE (Java Secure Sockets Extension). Used basic authentication (user name and password) for data exchange authentication with some partners.

• Participated in the architecture, design and development of the 3rd generation CarsDirect.com web site using JSPs (Java Server Pages) and Java business objects. Integrated some of the Java business objects with the JSPs. The web site was developed using Apache Tomcat and deployed on BEA WebLogic and Oracle 8i.

• Designed and developed a search logging facility using Java, JDBC, Oracle. The search logs collect data for statistical analysis of visitor views of and clicks on listed used vehicles in the used cars portion of the CarsDirect.com web site.

• Designed a symmetric key management infrastructure for securing consumer identifying information and credit information, including master key generation and persistence, with support for key rotation and recovery. The key management infrastructure was implemented in Java.

• Designed and developed a distributed, coordinated task execution facility in Java. The facility supports replication on multiple hosts throughout the network to achieve fault-tolerance, with only a single one of those available process instances actively performing work. Coordination of the replicated instances is achieved through periodic inspection and mutation of a shared "baton" maintained in a database.

• Participated in the design and development of a Java and XML framework for integrating enterprise applications. Designed and developed the enterprise application interface adapter for transfering enterprise information into the Lawson financial system through the Lawson AGS (Application Gateway Service).

• Participated in the design and development of a vehicle configuration service for the CarsDirect.com website using a Java servlet and related classes. The servlet substantially improved vehicle configuration and pricing accuracy over previous deployments. The servlet was designed to be fault-tolerant using cookies for distributed data caching. It was also designed to withstand modest but sustained request volume (on the order of 30-40 requests per second operating 24 x 7).

• Designed and developed a Java instrumentation facility for collecting and reporting resource and performance statistics. Instruments included several kinds of counters and meters. Obtained some counter values from native Windows counters. Designed and developed a JNI (Java Native Interface) layer that provided access to the Windows performance counters using Microsoft Visual C++.

• Designed and developed a regression test harness for testing the performance and load bearing capabilities of the vehicle logic engine using Java. The test harness simulates random interactions from multiple simultaneous users. The number of users and the weighting of random choices are configured using a properties file, along with a variety of other test parameters.

• Maintained automated build and deployment scripts with Ant, Perl and StarTeam.