There’s an old saying that what’s down in the well comes out in the water. It just means that if the inside of something is good, then the outside will also be good and vice versa. That’s true for a web portal as well. If the machinery and systems behind the portal aren’t strong, then the portal will never be great. After all, a portal is just a window into the systems behind the curtain. The functionality and design of the portal are limited by the information it can access and the automated services it can utilize.

Let’s bring this back to The Planet: What does Orbit have access to? A lot. The Planet has spent years automating systems and refining our databases. We now have quite a collection of automated services and a strong data warehouse. Our current Orbit 2.0 platform offers a lot of automated functionality. With the iPhone web app, you can easily access the key functionality and data on your phone.

We’re working on a new way to leverage all of that automation and information. As we started looking at how we can take our portal to the next level, we took a long look at our software architecture and infrastructure. What we found was some great functionality built on a sort of mish-mash of technologies and architectures. This isn’t uncommon in systems that are 10 years old, but it definitely makes the job of upgrading the portal more time consuming.

We have started implementing a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) from the ground up. This will provide us with a great foundation for an extensible internal API, as well as a robust external API. But first, we have a lot of work in front of us to untangle and normalize internal services and functional responsibilities. We are prioritizing that work according to the results of customer surveys and visits. All of this will result in more dependable portal functions and a much more powerful API.

What you will see is a pipeline of functionality: New internal services will be followed by portal improvements, which will be followed by new APIs.

SOA Services (Internal) » Portal Improvements » External APIs

Right now, we are in beta on some new RESTful APIs. We want to prove out our infrastructure and approach. Our SOA rollout and beta should be happening around the end of Q2/early Q3.

We’re working in a lot of directions at once right now. In my next blog, I’ll talk about the changes we’re making in all of our areas that will provide the foundation for this new and improved collection of services and APIs.

-Duke