Customer (country) :	HOP-GO-USA Inc., worldwide eSport organization.
Business Case :	HOP-GO is a largest eSport community including millions of participants all over the globe. To ensure continuous community growth the company decided to bring membership payment services to Internet as much as possible. Carefully examined HOP-GO business needs, Syntone had proposed complete web payment and back-office accounting solution to ensure highest security, performance and reliability requirements. Solution was designed to smoothly integrate with HOP-GO game server, authorization system and community portal as well as with external systems like VeriSign, SoftKey and Microsoft GreatPlains accounting software. Having in mind large number of users, Syntone gave a special attention to interface usability.
Solution :	Resulted solution supports both online payments and scratch-card activations in a convenient and controlled way. The back-office of the solution has a capability to supply financial data collecting, updating and reporting. Distributed architecture allows 24x7 flawless system functioning in the high-load conditions, when hundreds of transactions per minute are processed. Syntone developed a system, which supports all financial operations required for successful work of HOP-GO services system. This system supports online sales (online payments) and scratch-card activation (physical sales). Additional capabilities of the software include: financial data collecting, updating and reporting. System is created to function in an international environment; it is integrated with SoftKey and Verisign online payment systems and supports plug-in technology for new payment systems addition. HOP-GO system consists of following main parts: Administration subsystem Charging subsystem Card manager subsystem Payment subsystem Statistics subsystem Subscription service User management component Online services Pluggable payment service for payment processors Logical View This system uses card activation code for internal accounting needs, so it is possible to pay for online service using scratch cards. Credit cards payments are also associated with activation codes, since users purchase activation codes online with their credit cards. Activation code represents "virtual scratch card" of some value, some atomic time period (subscription atom), which is a period when the access for online service enabled. The procedure of payment in such a system is divided into two phases. The first phase is scratch card purchase (which can happen online, where user purchases virtual card (activation code), or offline, where user purchases scratch card with an activation code on it); the second phase is code activation, when the user enters his code into a system to receive access to HOP-GO services. Modular architecture, created by Syntone, allows this system to be easily upgraded or integrated with third-party services (online payment systems, for example). System supports multi-currency accounting and provides user with configurable interface that can support several languages. System has a capability to store multilingual information and country-specific information, such as address format, accounting properties, etc. Since the main requirements were high performance and stability, Syntone had created a distributed system. Components and subsystems are physically distributed (and duplicated) across several servers. An advanced administrative module was developed to monitor all system activities and divergences to increase system's stability and lower support costs. This module generates different reports about clients activity and subsystems overall status. The following deployment view demonstrates this system's modular architecture: Deployment View Application's backend and web-service run on application server. The back-end communicates with database using database-specific protocols; communication with external payment systems is conducted with these systems-specific protocols. The system receives and parses email notifications from SoftKey and uses specific protocol to collaborate with Verisign. System administrator uses web browser-based interface and HTTP protocol (HTTPS for secured connection) to access application server, email client is used to send/receive email notifications. HOP-GO Client use web browser and HTTP(S) protocol to access application server and to access SoftKey to make their orders. RMI protocol is used to communicate with external authorization subsystem. Application uses external authorization subsystem's interfaces, which are published in RMI registry. Application publishes its interfaces in registry, so external authorization subsystem can use them. Two-phased commit process is used to provide transactional mechanism for some operations that have to be executed on both systems - application and external authorization subsystem. Client's registration or card activation are examples of such an operations. Overview of vertical design The business-logic of the system is implemented with services approach. ServiceManager subsystem is a single point for managing services. Each service registers itself in this subsystem, also the ServiceManager stores list of all services, performs search of service by name, and provides database connection pooling. ServiceManager can be set to split different systems working in a system into several JVMs, which will allow the system to work on a cluster of servers. Presentation layer is built using Apache Struts framework, with JSP and XML usage. Resin XSLT processor transforms XML into HTML code using XSLT formatters. The whole system consists of about 30 complex use-cases, 100 mediocre, and 150 simple use-cases.
Tools and Technologies :	Java, XML, XSL, XSLT, JSP, Java Servlets, Oracle 9i, JMS, Caucho Resin v.2.1, Apache Struts
Benefits :	The whole innovative design based on distributed architecture and business-logic sharing gives HOP-GO reliable, user-friendly and controllable online payment service, backed with comprehensive accounting. This resulted in great benefits for HOP-GO, such as enlarged users community and reduced cost of customers support.
Reference :	"Our cooperation with Syntone started in 2002. At that time we had only begun HOP-GO project and we felt an urgent need for competent partner to develop payment component and internal accounting. The choice was hard, because we had to analyze more than just company size and previous experience factors. We had analyzed development processes and approach, quality of internal and external documentation, ability to cope with changing requirements. The very first results of cooperation with Syntone proved that the choice was right. Relatively small team demonstrated top qualification in every project phase: from with business-area analysis to deployed solutions support. Syntone has built transparent process of project planning, requirements management and quality assurance. During the solution's exploitation, at the high-load conditions (hundreds of transactions per minute) there was no critical fault interrupting normal functioning of this transnational project. Syntone's competent documentation, flexible architecture, quality code, constant consultancy and reasonable prices - all these factors allowed us to bring HOP-GO into operation mode in a short time, attract hundreds of thousands of new users and take a leading position at the segment of online sport communities." Sergey Chernov, CTO, HOP-GO

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