Designing an application

The example is focused on a simple company employee directory. The data follows the following schema: last name, first name, phone number, ID.

This sample application will provide the following functionality:

  • View a list of all employees

  • View and update an employee's information

  • Add a new employee

Although you could create this simple application using offline Web pages, in doing so, you would encounter a few limitations. First, to display all of the application data, you would need to create three basic pages:

  • A list page that displays all the employees names

  • An update and detail page for each employee

  • An add new user page

Another thing to consider is that because the server generates the update/detail pages, you will synchronize 102 Web pages to the device if you have 100 employee records in the directory. In addition, because the update/detail pages are generated by the server, none of the changes made to the update/detail page are be reflected in the list page until the changes have been synchronized with the server.

Although the same application created using DHTML and the M-Business XML conduit contains the same basic HTML pages listed above, you will implement them differently.

When using the M-Business XML conduit you will generate three types of files from the Web application server:

  • HTML pages that will access and format the data on the device.

  • XSD pages used by the M-Business XML conduit to process the XML file that contains the application data. This is the schema definition of the XML data.

  • XML pages that contain the data that is synchronized down to the device by the M-Business XML conduit and M-Business Server. There is a one-to-one relationship between XSD schema pages and XML pages.

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