"Eclipse Based Framework for e-Governance"

Supervised by Professor WM Holcombe

Abstract

Government infrastructure is complex consisting of heterogeneous systems, islands of proprietary legacy applications and frequently changing requirements. Improving public services being the business goal of Government, implementation of e-Governance becomes a necessity. Automation of processes and integration of all resources - including man, computers and data are the major challenges facing any e-Governance initiative.

A prototype framework to implement e-Governance has been developed for this project. Agile development of automated business processes for integration of resources has been demonstrated by developing and deploying a prototype business process using the framework. The framework also serves as a proof of concept for achieving the goals of e-Governance such as single window access for all public services by way of an E-Governance Portal.

The framework uses the Eclipse platform which is a scalable and extensible platform and supports Rapid Application Development(RAD)due to its plug-in architecture. Existing plug-ins available as open source have been used to design business process flows and a new plug-in has been developed to configure the business process. DOM XML parser, XSLT and XPath have been used to implement the plug-in functionality. The framework also includes in its scope J2EE compliant software infrastructure, such as application servers, workflow management systems, portals, SOAP engines, etc needed to execute the business processes in e-Governance and a central repository for storing re-usable software components to aid rapid application development.

Finally, the project provides a direction for further work to extend the framework in the area of e-Government portals, Identity Management and integration of web services into the process flows. Extension points have also been provided to add plug-ins to extend the functionality of the framework.