The Blink Mobility Platform uses Amazon Web Services to deliver an extremely scalable and robust deployment platform, using most aspects of the AWS to achieve superior results.
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Testing and Demonstration environments are kept on separate instances, so that they do not impact upon our Production Environment.
The Building Blocks
The Platform revolves around the Interaction. An Interaction defines a particular user request – it’s a verb. Interactions find, display, link, and fetch varied information from disparate information sources.
- Where is the nearest library?
- How many PCs are available?
- I need to report a pothole!
- When’s my plane leaving?
- What jobs do I have to do today?
With the BlinkMobile system you describe these verbs in an object we call, unsurprisingly, an Interaction. You don’t create application functionality, you don’t store any data, and you just encapsulate behaviour as micro applications.
These objects are the core of the BlinkMobile architecture. We call it our Interaction-oriented architecture – every aspect of functional delivery is in support of these User Interactions.
Using What’s Available
A service-oriented architecture abstracts business functionality into well-defined services whilst the Interaction-oriented architecture provides a device independent visualization of those services that can be delivered as a platform service.
If there aren’t services in neat APIs, Interactions can still deal with them. Interactions can deal with html, documents, spreadsheets, and databases etc.. An Interaction can access almost any information that can be accessed through the Internet.
Before we go any further, make sure you have familiarised yourself with our Glossary of Terms
, found in your Files section of this course.