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The Sybase Unwired Platform provides enterprises with exactly that… a platform with which to serve up enterprise data to be used either by “mission critical” apps where offline capability is vital, or by “hybrid” applications that mobilise business workflows and offer mobile users last-mile connectivity for workflow applications. In this blog we will take a look at how SUP meets the key business challenges for each of these mobile application categories. We will also look at the role that middleware plays in supporting either application type and explain the concept of Mobile Business Objects which is fundamental to the SUP design paradigm. (There is a third class of mobile applications referred to as “instant value” apps. These are online browser based apps that cannot be used offline. Collectively these application types form what is often referred to as the mobile “application spectrum”).

The Challenge: Mission Critical Apps

Mission critical apps inherit their name from the nature of the business process they mobilise. These are apps which cannot afford to leave their users in the dark when there is no connection available. Therefore these apps are built to interact directly with enterprise data stored locally on the device.

The Solution: Cache Synchronization Apps

The Sybase Unwired Platform supports mission critical applications by equipping developers with a client application programming interface (API) and server components to enable synchronisation of enterprise data between the device and the backend. Traditionally synchronization logic can account for up to 60% of the development effort if it were to be built from scratch. Therefore from a development point of view, a complexity-alleviating tool like SUP allows developers to focus on delivering mobile apps that offer great user experience and sound business process in a relatively rapid time frame.

The Challenge: Hybrid Apps

Hybrid apps inherit their name from their ability to merge the instant value proposition of Web technologies (like HTML, CSS and JavaScript) with native device services such as GPS, telephone and notifications.

The Solution: Hybrid Web Container

The Sybase Unwired Platform supports hybrid applications through the Hybrid Web Container and typically serves apps with low data volumes, simple user interfaces, no long lasting offline transactions and basic business logic.
The Hybrid Web Container is a native application with an embedded browser. It is an application in its own right, built by Sybase in iOS, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry flavours. Its Web browser  capability allows the Hybrid Web Container to exploit the power of Web standards such as HTML/CSS and JavaScript to enable Web developers to apply skills they already have to build mobile apps that support the following use cases:

• Lookup – Allows mobile users to request information from the enterprise backend by invoking a simple request/reply or lookup.
• Workflow - Mobile workflow enablement where the mobile user needs to take action or make a decision to move a transaction along the business process.
• Notification – some event takes place in the backend resulting in the mobile user being notified with information.

More about the Platform

Middleware

Both mission critical and hybrid mobile applications require some kind of integration middleware to coordinate the various push notifications and data synchronisation mechanisms across multiple device subscriptions. The Sybase Unwired Platform provides developers with a set of tools and components to design both cache synchronisation apps and Hybrid Web Container apps through a single integrated development environment known as the Sybase Unwired Workspace. Mobile applications are modelled using the SUP modelling concept called Mobile Business Object (MBO). Once defined, mobile applications are then deployed to the Sybase Unwired Server. This middleware component provides consolidation of enterprise data from heterogeneous backends and out to a heterogeneous pool of mobile devices.

The MBO Concept

A concept known as Mobile Business Objects (MBO) modelling allows different data provisioning sources such as Web Services, JDBC and JCo connections to be bound to an abstract business object known as an MBO. Amongst other things MBOs describe how data is to be loaded from the backend and how data is to be synchronised out to a device (for cache synchronisation apps that is). Relationships can be defined between MBOs in what is effectively the data model for a mobile application – similar to an entity relationship diagram.