A bespoke customer portal for a freight forwarding company that enables clients to view bookings, shipping details, bills of lading, other documents, invoices, and submit shipping instructions. The application integrates with Oracle Transport Management (OTM) to ensure real-time updates of new and modified shipments. Transform Technologies is the front company of a large UAE-based freight forwarder
We have been working with InfoMover Technologies since 2018. They have built several solutions for us, including NVOCC customer portal, feeder customer portal, bill of lading printing app, freight customer portal, a chartering solution, a big-data & analytics solution for our group of companies, couple of integration solutions of which one was EDIFACT file based integration and a couple of mobile apps. Each project exceeded our expectations. I wish them all the best!
Mapping OTM fields to the customer portal database was challenging. To future-proof the solution, we developed a custom framework using a JSON-based config file for API configurations. This file specifies which OTM API fields to extract, the synchronization intervals, and automatic invocation of related APIs. It also supports SPeL-based expressions for precise data extraction. Need a new field from OTM? Just add it to the config file.
The application was designed to be highly scalable, capable of handling large datasets, near-real-time synchronization with OTM, and supporting a high volume of concurrent requests.The architecture is fully microservices-oriented, with each service running in its own JVM. There are over seven services built on the Spring Cloud framework, using Spring Cloud Gateway as the API gateway and Eureka as the discovery server. Each service operates independently, with no direct service-to-service calls. All communication is handled via Kafka using the PUB-SUB model, and in some cases, ReplyingKafkaTemplate is utilized.
A document management system was required to support document uploads and synchronization with OTM. This included pushing documents to OTM and pulling documents like BL (Bill of Lading) from OTM. The system also needed to provide a document viewer for easy access and viewing.We implemented the document management system on top of AWS S3. Files are securely stored and accessed via services that interact with S3 for efficient storage and retrieval
Complexity of Shipping InstructionsThe complex data entry process is managed with a neatly designed & user-friendly interface. The customer portal supports, addition and submission of shipping instructions. Customers can stage and modify instructions until final submission. Upon submission, the instructions are updated in OTM.
Security & role based accessWe implemented user management with role-based access to ensure shipment and accounting details are available based on user roles. The application also supports multi-domain functionality, allowing freight forwarders to manage multiple companies and locations. Customers can access transactions specific to their configured businesses and locations, ensuring secure and relevant access.
Email, WhatsApp & In-App notifications were supposed to be provided as wellThe messaging backbone is Kafka which makes sure that the application is completely agnostic of OTM. A special service does the job of consuming messages from Kafka and triggering notifications via email & WhatsApp
Custom build oAuth 2.0 based security systemWe built a custom OAuth 2.0 authorization and authentication system on top of Spring Security, with MongoDB for the user repository and encrypted passwords. A common library used by most services employs a SecurityContext pattern to dynamically provide logged-in user information based on the request token. APIs are further secured using @PreAuthorize annotations with role-based access control
NoSQL DatabaseThe data is modeled in line with NoSQL principles and sits on ATLAS MongoDB. Each micro-service has its own database in the cluster
