Here is where the line items that make up the bills to be sent to the customers are stored, together with a record of the bills themselves and customers’ payments against the bills. Different situations need different inputs and outputs.

When a usage on a service is being recorded, the input comes from the billing calculator and consists of the account ID, a description of the usage, who used it and the amount.

The account owner (i.e. the budget holder responsible for paying the bill) can query the Trade Account Service to get a statement of how much they owe. The input to this is the account ID, and the output is an itemised statement of the usage on the account (who used it and what was used) together with the associated cost (this is similar to many types of itemised bills for example for a mobile phone, a restaurant or a hotel).

Finally (and probably most importantly for the provider) is the recording of payments on the account. Payments are handled out of band, as they go through the conventional banking system, but the trade account must be made aware of payments from a customer, and hence there is an interface for logging these payments. The input is the account ID and the amount. The result is that the amount the customer owes the provider is reduced by the amount of the payment and this is shown on the statement.

Prerequisites

Software Installation

Prerequisites

The Trade Account Service is a Java application exposed as a WebService having no particular installation prerequisites, all the libraries that are need should be provided before the installation package:

              ·        Apache Axis

·        Apache WSS4J

·        GRIA

·        Hibernate

It runs with a Java runtime environment version 1.6 or greater.

Installation

The TAS component is deployed as a Web service in a .war file. By using the BREIN installer, the .war file is just deployed inside the AXIS server container. In order to run the application, the user can just link the TAS file which starts AXIS.

To configure the component, the user can update the configuration file (sess.properties) with the following properties:

·    log_file: the path of the file where the logs are stored.

·    log_level: level of the log (FINE, CONFIG, INFO, WARNING, SEVERE)

·    url_slat: the URL where the TAS service is deployed

Finally, the services should be accessible locally at the following URL:

            http://localhost:8080/TAS-2.0/TASService