The application was designed as an n-tiered application, with the interface separated from the back-end logic. The data for each transaction needed to be transformed a number of different ways, depending on how it needed to be rendered on a device, presented to an application, or formatted for the back-end processing system. In other words, the application was a perfect opportunity to use XML.

As with any application, the user interface to the application was extremely important. To simplify the first implementation, the necessary XML data was transformed into HTML. This gave users a browser interface to the application. The registry was built with VisualAge for Java, specifically the Visual Servlet Builder component. It also uses Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), including Session beans and Entity beans.