Francis Blesso has helped companies solve complex techincal problems. Below is a sample of his successes. Email Francis for more detail.

Selected Projects
Web Services and Message Driven Beans
Performance Tuning
Source Code Management and Deployment
Enterprise Application Integration

Web Services and Message Driven Beans

Problem:

To price policies, a large property insurer needed to determine the FEMA flood risk. A third party provides a FEMA flood risk web service over the internet. However, the client did not want to wait for the lookup.

Solution:

Francis created a Message Driven Bean to handle the flood zone lookup. When the user saves address information, the system writes a JMS message containing the latitude and longitude. The Message Driven Bean handles the message by invoking a Web Services request using Apache Axis to look up the flood zone. Upon determining the flood zone, the MDB updates the address record with the flood zone value. Built-in retry logic ensures no request is lost due to service outages or other exceptions.

Performance Tuning

Problem:	A client's premium management batch program was taking more than 24 hours to process a large policy. Several client attempts failed to improve performance.
Solution:	Francis analyzed the code, identified several poorly performing algorithms, and coded faster versions. The re-written program processed in one-half hour, well within the batch window.

Source Code Management and Deployment

Problem:	A Fortune 500 company needed to manage custom code and vendor code for an e-procurement package. None of the team members had any prior source code management experience.
Solution:	Francis designed an approach to link the custom package code with CVS while respecting the vendor's file structure. A CruiseControl implementation provided developers the capability to deploy the code and track builds. He provided training for CVS, the Eclipse IDE, CruiseControl, and related Unix scripts.

Enterprise Application Integration

Problem:	To evaluate underwriting performance, a leading workers compensation provider needed to measure a policy's premium versus a standard benchmark premium. The underwriting system would compute premiums using the policy rates and the benchmark rates, and send both premium sets to a data warehouse.
Solution:	Francis worked with business owners to document, analyze, and refine the requirements. From the requirements, he defined an XML format to exchange premium data between the underwriting system and the data warehouse. Francis built the component to create the XML and send to the data warehouse system via MQSeries.