Enterprise open source Toolkit

Linux opens London's Oyster

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 May 2008 14:39 BST

...to an 18-person team at Deloitte to rebuild the online part. "Deloitte provides the online and development team for Oyster Online," said Robinson. "Tfl manages the user experience and business processes."

Before the changeover, Tfl had no control over any innovations because the architecture was inflexible, said Robinson: "The data layer was locked into a proprietary data model, with passwords encrypted using a hashing algorithm." Changes meant that at the time Tfl had to make all its customers re-register online for new passwords, but the new system uses a model where "that sort of thing won't happen".

Tfl was also at the mercy of the original supplier. "If you are locked into one organisation, they can afford to charge whatever they like — there is no competing with anyone else."

Deloitte built a web front-end that interfaces to the EDS back-end using web services. The new online system is based on open standards and open-source software, including the Apache web server, JBoss middleware and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, said Robinson.

For some parts of the system, they stuck with proprietary software — for instance, the online service is based on an Oracle database, in order to get clustering and high availability, said Robinson. "It could have been done with MySQL or Postgres, but that would have taken more consultancy time," he explained.

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In cases like this, Deloitte kept away from lock-in: "We used open standards, not a proprietary flavour of them; for instance SQL, but not the Oracle flavour of it," he said, adding that "open-source products tend to be better at complying with open standards".

The new site went live in 2007, and immediately cut the regular charges for licensing and hosting by 80 percent, by allowing Tfl to shop around for the best hosting deal. This saving alone will cover the cost of the Deloitte project in a year, said Robinson, even apart from benefits such as PCI compliance and flexibility.

The site now works faster and performs better and allows new applications and code to be added with no downtime. This means the online site can now entice users to move to automatic top-up by offering them vouchers for free tracks on iTunes, something the old system would have been incapable of doing. "The Deloitte team all de-registered their Oysters, and re-registered to get the iTunes," joked Robinson.