… morning coffee on Allevo’s rooftop terrace.

Developers from our banking customers as well as computer science students have gathered here today to test their skills in a core banking open project and to learn more about the FINkers United community. For students, as one of them said during the break the ice exercise, the best way to learn new things is to get involved in such projects because they have the opportunity to hit the ceiling, get in touch with things that are not taught in schosee what role they can play in the community around FinTP.

In the first part of the event, Corina gave the most compressed and comprehensive in the same time presentation of FinTP, including not only its features, but also painting a clear image of the market infrastructures, explaining debit, credit, settlement and what a payment really is.

Coffee breaks are also constructive. Cause people really start socializing, sharing ideas, communicating.

After the break, it was Andreea’s turn to present the processes of the FINkers United community and how they are designed to provide a flexible way of working and integrating code into the existing trunk.

The development, testing and implementation processes are no different from those of any other development project; they are inspired by Allevo’s CMMI level 3 internal processes. The roles defined for the development process comprise of: project manager (also responsible for managing releases), technical committee, developer, tester, peer review group, build engineer, integrator and other contributors who deal with documentation etc.

Last but not least, as he really spoke in the participants’ language, Horia, our software development director presented the FinTP architecture; from data layer, through business layer and all the way up to the user interface, FinTP is in fact a full solution for financial institutions.

He emphasized the fact that we are 100% committed to open source. We are building FinTP on a a fully open platform: Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, using open tools like OpenSSL, Boost, Xerces, Xalan, Jersey, JPA etc. We are also giving back to the community: we use LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Maven Jenkins, Sonar, Doxygen. Nevertheless, we will continue to support Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other proprietary technologies; but FinTP will be available on a full open source platform.

Since FinTP Hackathon #1 (15 May this year), we finished the migration from WMQ to AMQ. We have added more resources to the API, we have built additional unit tests and we have integrated authentication and authorization.

We have started to work on a new user interface, a lightweight UI that will also run on mobile platforms. Furthermore, we have integrated the API in the user interface, we have finalized the PostgreSQL migration and our developers have also deployed the final touches to the database schema v2. They are now focusing on decoupling and repackaging the business flows to separate them from the application itself.

What it means to have a developer talk to other developers: Horia had them all listening and asking so many questions that nobody felt the need for lunch anymore.

Now the six week of coding are starting. So let’s wish the participants best of luck. Start hacking, guys and we’ll see who the lucky winner of an iPad 4 is on December 12. I can’t put a good word for anyone with the jury, so it’s all on you.

Just a few more things before I go:

• Here is a short video from the event