ASR "Revest-Billing"

Each new task begins with the selection of the tools with which it will be implemented. And how correctly they are selected depends on its win or fail. I happened to join the project with a basic programming language, very unusual and rarely used. And this did not prevent his formation and the current successful development. What am I talking about?


As you might have guessed by tags, we are talking about Smalltalk. This language allows you to organically develop and maintain a code of a large degree of complexity, using modern Agile-methodologies such as Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Continuous Integration, etc. It was he who was chosen as a tool for developing a billing system back in 2001 in the Tver Internet provider TeleNET. All these years, Smalltalk (and the billing written on it) remained the company's secret weapon until it was decided to release the genie to freedom, transferring its development to the Revest company. This is how our product appeared - Revest-Billing Automated Payment System .
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It should be added that by the time of my entry into the development team, I already had experience in developing billing systems (open ASR TBilling , which is successfully used in Tver State University), but I took part in such a large project for the first time.

How is this done?

The brain of the billing system is an application server, written in Dolphin Smalltalk , all business logic is embedded in it. It processes all data from authorization and statistics centers / pre-billing centers (which I will discuss a little further about), and stores them in a central database managed by Oracle. By choosing a high-level development tool, we managed to achieve fantastic flexibility of all system components; for example, consider the charging module. We had no special efforts to implement tariff plans, in which the weekly discount was calculated on the basis of the previous week’s work or automatically added to users who connected to the provider more than a year ago. Naturally, it is not difficult to calculate the usual unlimited tariffs.

Pre-libraries work with different types of access servers and ATCs. The range of equipment with which the pre-billing works is very wide and due to this it is possible to process data of different types of access: broadband internet, dialup, normal and ip telephony, card platform. Pre-billing is also integrated with its own hosting system and mail server.

Another important part of our system is a payment processing server. It allows you to make payments from various sources: 1C, instant payment systems, ATMs; A special module 1C allows you to exchange other data on clients with this server.



The graphical billing interface is unified both for the server and for client sites (subscriber department, technical support, etc.) and its functionality is determined by the profile of a specific user. For subscribers, a web interface is provided through which you can see the statistics of operating time, balance, etc.

How we are working?

A distinctive feature of our company is the possibility of complete outsourcing of billing services for telecom operators. This has been successfully tested by our partners and has proven its effectiveness. In fact, the operator does not need its own billing service; Our monthly services are quite comparable with the costs of maintaining an average specialist in billing systems in the castle.

Where are we going?

And we are going to expand the ways of obtaining billing data. For this, we are developing a web-based billing system based on Seaside and a system for generating reports based on Ruby On Rails . In addition, we are constantly working to expand the functionality of our system to meet the needs of our customers.

I will be ready to tell you more about any aspect of Rekvest-Billing ASR's work and about billing systems in general, or even maybe about Smalltalk, ask questions in the comments.

UPD At the request of workers, I add a screenshot of the contract editing window: