Suscipe is a forum for entrepreneurs coorganized by the student associations in Spain of the London Business School, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Standford University, as well as by the Association of former interns of “la Caixa”, in collaboration with the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

The following is event’s program (pdf). The event is free of charge and you can attend only the parts you are interested in:

• 19:15: Innovative Project: Tractis
• 20:00: Special Guest: Angel Iglesias, founder of Ikusi, a Spanish company with over 700 employees present in more than 80 countries
• 21:15: Networking event

My presentation will be focused on the project itself, whereas Angel Iglesias will talk about his activity and entrepreneurial experience. The event will take place in the Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Industriales de Madrid, Room 3 (c/ José Gutierrez Abascal 2. Zona Paseo Castellana – Nuevos Ministerios).

Francisco Hernández, one of Suscipe’s coordinators, told me that 113 people have already confirmed their assistance, but there is still room for more. Whether you use Tractis or not, if you are starting your own project, or are interested in spending some time with people that want to make a difference, I will be happy to meet you in person.

Update 2008.05.26: The organizers at Suscipe have just uploaded the video of the presentation of Tractis.

The Glider Awards are the awards Negonation gives its most valuable collaborators. What’s new to this edition is that all awards have been decided by the Negonation staff (vs. collaborators votes in past editions). This comes in response to a strategy that we have been following since mid last year in order to decrease the number of collaborators and increase the intensity of the collaboration with a few.

The first winner, with an award of 1000 €, is José Luis Gordo Romero. José Gordo is a regular winner of these awards: he already received recognition in past editions and, this time, he’s won first place again, being the first collaborator in Tractis history who has received the title of Glider Hacker twice (the first time being in the first edition of the Awards). Over the past few months –actually, since the beginning of the project–José has been helping us on a regular basis with system administration, server configuration, server certificates, DNS administration, back-ups, etc. Working with him is a real pleasure. He is professional, competent, and honors all of his commitments. Tractis wouldn’t be the same without you, José!

The second Glider Award, also worth 1000 €, goes to Choan Gálvez. We met Choan through Diego Lafuente, our Creative Director. Choan is a true magician of javascript and the creator of Protomean–the contract editor used in Tractis. In addition to handling himself really well in the, poorly documented, javascript world, Choan is an enthusiast of short stories and board games.

Despite not receiving a prize in cash, a special mention goes to Tatiana Nubiola, our linguistic guru, guardian of the style guide and enthusiast of the Academy of the Spanish Language and its dictionaries. She is responsible for most of the English translations and copy choices you see in Tractis. This makes Tatiana the first collaborator awarded with a Glider that (1) is a woman, (2) lives abroad (NY State, for those of you who were wondering), and (3) doesn’t program a single line of code. Tatiana is proof that you don’t need to know how to program to be a hacker.

Congratulations to the winners!

PS I apologize for the late post, I promise to post sooner next time.

Companies always have to choose between various options to reduce costs and maximise benefits. They must decide whether to rent or buy offices, to externalise or otherwise certain business functions: with outsourcing, offshoring and other strategies that, in the end, help develop the core competence of the company without submitting it to increases or decreases in the size of the workforce or property required according to demand.

In the IT field, such decisions are normally related to software development: the typical ‘do we do it in-house or externally?’ question. But it is not very common to apply similar strategies to other areas in the IT field.

In the area of IT infrastructure (where the company’s services run), such thoughts are often dismissed because the criticality of the applications leads to thoughts that it is not a good idea to delegate their operation, not even a small part of them, to a third party for fear of losing ‘total control’. Right now, and with increasing frequency – above all in the internet company sector – there is an increasing perception that it is not necessary for the company to develop its own infrastructure to run its applications. Some even decide that they don’t even need their own infrastructure to develop their core business.

If we translate the problem to a more common equivalent – when we flick a switch to turn on a light, we want illumination and we don’t really care where the electricity is produced, we simply want the thing to work. We don’t need a nuclear power station at home to light a bulb, but if we have a company and electricity is the key to developing our business, we will surely want to maintain the electricity supply in case of failure. In such cases it would be more practical to think of having multiple failover providers other than becoming our own provider.

Utility computing: IT like water or electricity

For years this thought has been shaped by the leading computer companies who want IT converted into just another commodity, such as electricity, gas or water, for client companies.

Currently certain components such as computation or storage are being commoditised to a sufficiently mature level that they can be used by companies in production environments, something which is important because it permits economies of scale in supply companies who can therefore offer a better service at a better price.

So, we could have our application running on virtual servers which we pay for according to usage, our backups or content to serve could be on remote storage servers, meaning that we would avoid spending on backup and storage devices (the cost of a good backup system can be significant). We could serve certain content by employing content delivery networks (giving the impression of having a data centre near the client) and bit by bit externalise certain infrastructure services to specialist providers reducing costs and improving the quality of service.
We could go even further and adapt certain components to be available such that they are provided by specialist 3rd party companies. This way we would avoid the development and maintenance costs, which in certain cases can be an important part of the budget for an application. We could optimise and externalise if it is not adding value to our application.

Digital signature on demand

Within this type of components ripe for being provided by specialised 3rd parties, we find public key and digital signature infrastructure, more and more vital in applications, above all in the internet world, but which are complex and are non-trivial to develop.

In this field, there is a tendency to use existing libraries in the product or install already developed products – open source or commercial – from third parties. The problem is that development, installation and maintenance of these types of solution is not very accessible.

They’re only within reach of companies that have huge budgets and, even in these cases, they often lack the know-how or don’t budget for maintenance and continuous improvement of the infrastructure. The result is deployments that don’t represent the total cost of ownership (TCO), quickly become obsolete, are deployed in a buggy state or even aren’t deployed at all.

The field of public key infrastructure was the first of the two to make a move and now today certain activities, such as the role of issuing certificates, is limited to a small group of specialist providers, given that it is an activity that requires an large amount of money and strength to put into production.

People are still waking up to the complexity of digital signature infrastructures and while very few consider developing their own certification agency, it is common to attempt to develop a digital signature authority (be it for creation, validation, signing or storage).

A good idea is to apply a similar criteria to that of certification agencies and delegate the digital signature services to a third party and therefore concentrate on developing our main business activity.

In fact, more and more public institutions and private companies in Spain are making use of third party platforms that offer public key and digital signature infrastructure services, opening a new IT market and reinforcing the idea that such critical jobs should be centralised to specialised providers who can take advantage of economies of scale to optimise cost and maximise the quality of the end product.

We believe that this is an important idea since the domains of public key infrastructure and digital signature should be something that companies can integrate in their applications without the need for large sums of money or effort as has been the case till now. We realise how complicated it can be to solve these problems because we too have been there and for this reason we decided to open our digital signature services and offer them as third-party services because in the Internet, security should be a commodity, not a luxury.

The Belgian “eID”

Now you can use your Belgian eID to sign in Tractis. The “eID” is equivalent to the Spanish electronic ID card (DNIe) i.e. it is a government-issued card that incorporates a chip with a certificate that permits authentication (verifying your identity) and fully legally-binding digital signatures.

The Belgian government issues three types of eID:

1. eID for Belgian citizens (“eID“).
2. eID for Foreigners (“La carte pour étranger“).
3. eID for children (“Kids-ID“)

We will initially support the first two (citizens and foreigners). Given that children cannot sign contracts, we will incorporate “Kids-ID” in the future just for authentication (secure chats etc.). You can find up-to-date information on which certificates we support in our help section.

If you live in Belgium and still don’t have your eID, you can ask for one in the service area of your town or city or wait until they automatically issue you one sometime before the end of 2009. The price of your eID will depend on the area in which you live, generally between 10 or 15€. If you have an eID and want to use it with Tractis, you need a smart card reader (we will give you one for free) and to install the drivers for the Belgian eID on your computer.

Why Belgium?

As we have stated in previous posts, our objective for 2008 is international expansion in Europe. The reason why we have chosen to start in Belgium is that it is one of the countries that has pioneered e-IDs (electronic IDs). Belgium has 10.5m inhabitants and the majority now have e-IDs (more than 80% of the population in the three regions – Flandes, Valonia y Bruselas-Capital). In addition, there are a large number of applications and services that make use of digital signatures. They started the roll-out in September 2004 and now more than 7,000,000 people have an eID. The government plans to reach 8,000,000 in December 2009.

International Expansion: With your help

Belgium is the first country that we have launched in outside of Spain and marks the start of our international expansion. In the coming months, we willl start adding more than 30 countries. We are now working to incorporate certificates for Estonia, Portugal, Austria and others.

We would like to thank Rodolphe Cardon of Lichtbuer, Lieutenant d’aviation at Belgian Air Force and expert in digital signatures for his help in testing signatures with the Belgian eID.

Is Tractis not yet available in your country? Help us translate the interface to your language, investigate the legislation in your jurisdiction or perform tests with your preferred certificate. Your help in any of these areas would be very valuable for launching Tractis in your country. Contact us.

Caixa Galicia debuts digital signature of contracts with DNIe in the Spanish banking sector

The announcement is especially important because, although there are financial entities in Spain such as Bankinter, Kutxa, Caja Madrid or Banc Sabadell that have incorporated DNIe to authenticate (‘verify the identity of’) their users, Caixa Galicia is the first in Spain that allows the use of DNIe and other certificates for the digital signature of contracts with their customers. A big step that we’re proud to be a part of.
Caixa Galicia gave a press conference yesterday and also distributed a press release which various radio stations (SER), written press and online (Ya.com/Finanzas.com, Terra/Invertia, Yahoo Finanzas, Cinco Días, Abc.es, El Economista, Europa Press, El Correo Gallego, Todo es electrónico , Loogic, Enrique Dans and others) have picked up on and are broadcasting news of this event.

The first process: Opening accounts without bureaucracy

The first contractual process that has changed to use digital signatures with DNIe is the opening of accounts. From today, people who want to open an account with Caixa Galicia can do it 100% online, signing with their DNIe (or any other certificate accepted by Tractis), from the comfort of their home, without forms, without waiting and without visiting a branch.

The decision of Caixa Galicia to start with this process (vs. contracts with existing clients) shows their interest in the acquisition of new customers, making their life easier and at the same time complying with the new Spanish legislation on contracting services electronically.

This diagram shows the flow of the contracting process:

Easy, no? In reality it is a flow that is applicable to any contracting process where the company needs to compile information in advance about the client (phase 2: forms) in order to be able to later present them with a personalised contract containing the solicited information, ready for them to digitally sign (phase 5: signing).

This is what the client sees in Phase 2, a web page served by Caixa Galicia:

and this is what the client sees in Phase 5, a web page with the personalised contract ready to sign. All with the URL, logo and look & feel of Caixa Galicia but served from Tractis:

An unbeatable experience

The experience of working with Caixa Galicia has been unbeatable. We’ve been very lucky to work with a team that is so professional, but at the same time so easy to get on with for our first big client. We’re especially grateful to Antonio Vazquez de Parga and Iván Rodríguez González from the Caixa Galicia digital strategy team for their vision and valuable feedback. Since they’ve given the green light to the project in December 2007 everything has worked out perfectly. The integration of the technology took only 2 weeks and the rest of the time was taken up with testing, training the customer service department, preparing the marketing launch material, changing the web pages, press release etc. A record time given the size of the client and the process implications.

Our first (big) client

Today 12th March 2008 is a very special day for us. It’s our first production launch of a big client using the Tractis API and processes that affect individuals and SMEs, our real focus. Successes such as this mean that all those hours without sleeping, the personal and professional sacrifices and bets of the team have been worthwhile. We’re on the right road. We’re very happy . We hope that this is just the start of the good news during 2008.

A while ago, we described our decision to use Ruby on Rails to develop Tractis and stated that we were happy to have chosen rails instead of Java. We also mentioned that, given the deficiencies of Ruby, we opted to employ Java Web Services for the digital signature back end.
Back then we were very happy with our choice of rails and we still are. The framework has given us a lot of agility and it’s fun to work with. Anyone who follows the blog has seen that we even participate whenever possible at Rails events to show our satisfaction.

So, what of the development we’ve done in Java?

Re-reading that post, it sounds like we’re developing in Java because there was no other choice – that if we’d had the necessary Ruby libraries we wouldn’t have any Java code and we’d be even happier. With the appearance of JRuby there are those who ask us if we’d not rather run the application in JRuby on Rails and therefore have access to the Java libraries that we need, eliminating our need for web services.

Without doubt, that decision was not just about frameworks but was also an application design choice.

The design choice: web services architecture

As we said, when we selected the framework, we also chose the architecture. We decided that we wanted to develop various specific applications other than one that encompassed everything, in the pure UNIX style.

The truth is that, looking back, we’re very happy to have opted for a Rails front end but we’re also very happy to have chosen a web services architecture. So, just like when we discussed the advantages of choosing Rails, now we want to share with you the advantages of using web services.

Another buzzword

This type of architecture is fashionable and even has it’s own buzzword: SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). So you can now have your SOA application, done in Rails with a lot of AJAX.

If, on the contrary, you are like us and you are not motivated by buzzwords, read on

Quality

As we said earlier, the idea to design smaller and more specific applications that make up a larger application follows the UNIX philosophy.

If we stop and think about it, this is the philosophy that makes UNIX so powerful and one of the reasons why we like it so much. You have a load of specific programs: ls, grep, sed, awk… these programs do specific things but they do them very well.

Working with specific applications that have to resolve a concrete problem, we can concentrate much better on the problem at hand. You might think that to achieve task isolation it would be enough to develop libraries instead of applications – and you would be right. Having said that, developing distinct applications connected by web services allows us to have a totally language, framework and deployment-agnostic architecture. If, in the future, there are better tools in C++ or .NET for the validation of signatures, we can migrate just this application without impacting the rest of the system. Developing specific applications we can employ the best tools in each case.

In addition to the improved implementation quality, we have also discovered improvements at execution time – on one hand for scalability reasons which we’ll discuss in the next section, and on the other the flexibility to redeploy or deactivate a specific service without having to shut down the rest of the services.

Scalability

When we talk about scalability, we refer to scalability of technical resources as well as human resources. On the technical side, it’s very simple. At the start, you can have all the services on the same machine and if one becomes a bottleneck, you just move it to a dedicated machine. Additionally, if the service is share-nothing, you can deploy it on as many machines as you need to give a high level of service. This will be clear to anyone who works with Rails

On the human side, a service-based architecture allows us more room to scale our development, meaning we can move from managing a single larger team to assigning a smaller team per service. This way, as we grow and require more developers, it won’t be necessary to have a bigger and bigger team but rather a group of small, agile teams that are in charge of one or more services.

In future posts

In future posts we hope to talk in more detail about the our architecture, the services that compose it and what they are used for.
Bye for now!

The truth is that a well degraded site allows a user with an old browser to continue using the features of a site in a vertical form without styles, effects or customisations for the specific version of the browser. A user on a mobile device that doesn’t support CSS can make the best use of the information if it’s well degraded. The images – related to the content – will continue to be visible while the ‘decorative’ images will move to the second or third level.

The Challenge

From the outset we have tried to implement this principle in Tractis. We designed to a group of standards and not for a specific browser vendor. Although we tried to support obsolete browsers, we realised that it was a massive amount of work and that we couldn’t provide the quality we would have liked to. Designing something for a specific browser only means that the site will look horrible in others. It’s best to tie yourself to principles such as this one in order to support a wide range of usage scenarios.

The Solution

The code required to implement this principle is not the simplest. First you program in various logical layers: XHTML for structured data, CSS for the display of each structure, JS to control the events. You should be able to see the page without any CSS support – that’s the goal. A user should at least be able to read what they have in front of them. If this rule is not kept, the degradation isn’t satisfactory and implies that a user is limited. As the user understands this, using more recent versions of the browsers, they will start to receive prizes: the site will start to appear as intended full of details which we call presents. For example, upon entering a site with browsers that support hte standard text-shadow property, they can enjoy the details and shadows that the application permits.

The Effect

If you want to see the principle of degradation in action, view Tractis using Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 7. At a glance, the main menu of the application appears the same in all three, but users with more standards-compliant browsers can enjoy additional details. Safari users see the menu as it was intended while those of Firefox, which still doesn’t have support for shadows, will see another view that is correctly degraded. The menu remains the same it’s just that it responds to the properties that the browser supports.

Some screen shots of the menu in various grades of degradation:

Another excellent example of the principle of degradation is the shape of the action buttons. Depending on the version and brand of browser you use, you’ll see significant differences. Again: the full detail is available in browsers that support the standard border-radius and text-shadow properties while the rest will show it as they can, degrading lower and lower. En Safari, the buttons have rounded corners and shadows in the text, giving a button shape whereas in IE7 and Firefox, they change according to the capabilities of the browser: in IE7 the rounded borders don’t exist, giving the buttons a square shape and in Firefox, depending on the version, the borders are not as round as they should be.

Advantages for Tractis and our users

This principle benefits both us (as developers) and our users. We don’t work to Microsoft or Mozilla guidelines but to a set of standards and we consider it more important to have a high level of standards support than to support obsolete browsers. Our code is concise and fast. It is highly scalable compared to other projects and we can deal with many of the browsers that users might throw at us. Our users receive the benefit of code that follows the standards: high download speed, support, degradation, making the correct use of resources, and more.

The next time you navigate to a site and can’t use it because it’s not properly degraded, you’ll remember the standards and this post in which we talked about the principle of degradation.

We’re very, very happy to achieve such recognition. On behalf of the team that collaborates on Tractis, many thanks to those that voted for us, to the jury for choosing us, to Ana Morell and the Yahoo Iberia team for organising the event and to all the Tractis users who help us improve every day.

Our sincerest congratulations to all the finalists and to anyone who was inspired to start a project (whatever it was) in 2007. Yahoooooo!

Update 2008.02.29: Yahoo! Iberia has uploaded some photos of the event to Flikr.

The bulk of the article is a tutorial that describes how to quickly get started using the platform from registration to signing contracts, covering adding credit and changing colors and logo to adapt the look&feel to that of your company. It’s probably one of the best ways to learn the essentials of Tractis in a short period of time.

To install it, you just have to go to the mycroft project page and click on the “Tractis templates” link. Once installed, you can perform a search directly from the search bar of your browser.

We hope you find it useful. Now it’s a bit easier to search all the contract templates available in Tractis directly from your browser.