With the Application Edition of M-Business Anywhere, you can quickly develop dynamic, data-centric Web applications. One of the most efficient ways of developing Web applications is to keep application data separate from the presentation of the data. Separating presentation from data when you are developing Web applications for connected desktop browsers, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, allows you to present the application data in a variety of formats, for different form factors, and even multiple languages. When you develop Web applications in this way for use on mobile devices—where a network connection is not always available—you can use Web technologies to quickly create dynamic, data driven applications.

This chapter provides a step-by-step example for creating an application using the M-Business XML conduit and M-Business XML API. In this example, the data resides in a SQL Server 2000 database; the XML and Web pages are generated using ASP.NET. You also could use MySQL, Apache and Perl, a J2EE server and Oracle or any setup that allows you to generate Web pages and XML from a data source. The instructions included in this section assume that you already have installed M-Business Anywhere Application Edition.