It has been almost three and half years I have been working on Temenos GLOBUS/T24.I could still remember the first time I was told about my assignment on so called "GLOBUS" by my Manager.It was all jargon to me then when words like GLOBUS, UniVerse, INFOBASICS were pronounced.I was hoping to relate at least few words with something that most people speak or discuss among themselves in the outside world but uh-huh! Understanding my struggle to comprehend the discussion, my Manager thought it was best to leave me to the Lead of the assignment whom for the first time introduced me to GLOBUS and explained how important it was to Banks in their day to day operations.May be it was time for me to realize the fact that not every where programming knowledge in C, .Net or Java was needed.
To me who had been working on technologies with good quality GUI to it, the classic version of GLOBUS was quite dull and boring to look at.It was this black screen with map of the world been shown in the login screen.Interestingly,on a closer look the map was actually set of "$" symbols cleverly placed in the shape of the world map much to appreciate the creativity of the designer.
After having spent some time on the classic version of GLOBUS with a handbook titled 'Basic navigation in GLOBUS' on my desk,I felt it to be simple to use,fast in what ever it was doing and very command oriented.For instance, to list all the accounts of the bank,you provide command ACCOUNT L and that's it.The screen floods with the list of accounts which you can drill down further one by one.It's that simple!
The driving force behind the amazingly fast query results is the database clubbed with the product.It is called UniVerse which is an extended relational database or otherwise called Multivalue database.UniVerse was owned by IBM and later acquired by Rocket. I had worked on RDBMS like Oracle back then and was told that a table in Oracle is equal to a file in UniVerse.A row in a table is equal to a record in a file.When you view a UniVerse file with records in a text editor, you will find the contents with several markers which are interpreted by GLOBUS to be various fields.To amend records in files,UniVerse provides its own editor which was quite difficult to use in the beginning.It allows only line by line editing with line number specified each time which is quite a pain in the neck for any developer.
UniVerse provides a basic programming language called INFOBASICS which is very simple with its English language like syntax.As a developer,I had no difficulty in getting used to the programming language.It was lot easier to understand an already developed program and make changes to it.If you are one among those who hate classes,functions,OOPS concepts it will be very delighting to you to get your hands on INFOBASICS as it has got none.As the name suggests, it is very BASIC in all its presence and it does not take much time for a novice to write his first "Hello World" program.Maybe a little glance on the code snippet will let you know how it beats all in the Hello World race.
Code:
PROGRAM HELLOWORLD
CRT "HELLO WORLD"
END
Output:
HELLO WORLD
Any challengers!?
Relieving my worries of going color blind on seeing the same black and white screens the whole day, there did exist a colorful mode of GLOBUS called Desktop mode which for some reason, my client did not opt to use for banking operations.Apart from its usage in processing End of Day for its Multi-threading capability,I did not find many even talking about it.
After so many years of its presence in Banking industry,GLOBUS has now evolved to be a more mature and robust product called T24.My innocence or perhaps ignorance as a fresher to the industry never made me look at the bigger picture.For almost a year after working on it,I realized that T24 had already replaced GLOBUS in many banks and it was time for me to move on to T24.Luckily, my stint with GLOBUS ended on a good note as my client decided to move on from GLOBUS and from then on I choose to work only on T24!
To me who had been working on technologies with good quality GUI to it, the classic version of GLOBUS was quite dull and boring to look at.It was this black screen with map of the world been shown in the login screen.Interestingly,on a closer look the map was actually set of "$" symbols cleverly placed in the shape of the world map much to appreciate the creativity of the designer.
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| GLOBUS login screen in classic mode |
After having spent some time on the classic version of GLOBUS with a handbook titled 'Basic navigation in GLOBUS' on my desk,I felt it to be simple to use,fast in what ever it was doing and very command oriented.For instance, to list all the accounts of the bank,you provide command ACCOUNT L and that's it.The screen floods with the list of accounts which you can drill down further one by one.It's that simple!
The driving force behind the amazingly fast query results is the database clubbed with the product.It is called UniVerse which is an extended relational database or otherwise called Multivalue database.UniVerse was owned by IBM and later acquired by Rocket. I had worked on RDBMS like Oracle back then and was told that a table in Oracle is equal to a file in UniVerse.A row in a table is equal to a record in a file.When you view a UniVerse file with records in a text editor, you will find the contents with several markers which are interpreted by GLOBUS to be various fields.To amend records in files,UniVerse provides its own editor which was quite difficult to use in the beginning.It allows only line by line editing with line number specified each time which is quite a pain in the neck for any developer.
UniVerse provides a basic programming language called INFOBASICS which is very simple with its English language like syntax.As a developer,I had no difficulty in getting used to the programming language.It was lot easier to understand an already developed program and make changes to it.If you are one among those who hate classes,functions,OOPS concepts it will be very delighting to you to get your hands on INFOBASICS as it has got none.As the name suggests, it is very BASIC in all its presence and it does not take much time for a novice to write his first "Hello World" program.Maybe a little glance on the code snippet will let you know how it beats all in the Hello World race.
Code:
PROGRAM HELLOWORLD
CRT "HELLO WORLD"
END
Output:
HELLO WORLD
Any challengers!?
Relieving my worries of going color blind on seeing the same black and white screens the whole day, there did exist a colorful mode of GLOBUS called Desktop mode which for some reason, my client did not opt to use for banking operations.Apart from its usage in processing End of Day for its Multi-threading capability,I did not find many even talking about it.
After so many years of its presence in Banking industry,GLOBUS has now evolved to be a more mature and robust product called T24.My innocence or perhaps ignorance as a fresher to the industry never made me look at the bigger picture.For almost a year after working on it,I realized that T24 had already replaced GLOBUS in many banks and it was time for me to move on to T24.Luckily, my stint with GLOBUS ended on a good note as my client decided to move on from GLOBUS and from then on I choose to work only on T24!
