General Dynamics Canada’s Rapid Technology Integration Framework (RTIF)

Mike Gingell, Principal Engineer, General Dynamics Canada

Innovation comes in many flavors! General Dynamics Canada, Halifax, has been working with many customers to solve integration problems for many years. In traditional military programs, software and systems engineering costs are often too high, and the products that are developed are often stove-piped and are not re-usable. To support R&D work in Halifax, we needed an agile architecture to be able to reduce time to delivery, reduce cost and increase flexibility in a way that would allow us to re-use components across programs and would allow us to rapidly integrate and deploy new features into the mix. Many different architectures and patterns were evaluated and after many years of working with various technologies and SOAs, we finally discovered that a loosely coupled architecture, modeled using EIPs, would be an ideal solution to many of our integration problems. This is where we were able to leverage the benefits of the Apache OSS community! We have since developed a reusable set of core components that leverage Camel, CXF, ActiveMQ and OSGi that provides a number of core services that support many different defense applications – the collective set of technologies and services is known as RTIF. This presentation will talk about the benefits of this technology stack and how it has changed the way we develop systems!