Extending your enterprise business processes, data, and information away from the
office is critical to success in today's business environment, however, achievement of a
truly mobile enterprise entails many technical challenges.
Sybase® Unwired Platform provides a development and deployment platform that
solves challenges, supports mobile applications to fit your enterprise mobility use case,
and helps to balance device user requirements with enterprise requirements.
Mobility solutions present complexity to the IT organization. These complexities may
include, but are not limited to, lack of integrated solutions, heavy upfront costs
for large-scale customization requirements, and the lack of repeatable development
and deployment models. Sybase Unwired Platform addresses these
complexities by providing a platform-based solution that allows you to:
- Leverage existing mobile development tools and expertise to develop mobile
applications
- Develop mobile applications to meet your users' data needs and access data
from a variety of enterprise information systems
- Deploy to a variety of mobile device platforms
- Configure and manage the runtime environment to complement areas of your
existing infrastructure and security.
Sybase Unwired Platform supports development and deployment of several
categories of mobile applications to meet the enterprise system access needs of your
business scenario.
Offline Mobile Applications
With offline mobile applications,
information availability is mission critical regardless of connectivity. These
applications remain operational even when they are not connected to the EIS. Data is
synchronized between the Enterprise Information System (EIS) and the device when
connectivity is available. Application requirements typically involve:
- The need to use data on the device if the application is offline
- More complex task orientation, data input, and screen navigation
Offline applications are developed using the Sybase Mobile SDK
Object API . This development archetype enables developers to write custom code —
C#, Java, or Objective-C, depending on the target device platform — to create device
applications and provides flexibility in terms of leveraging platform specific
services. These native applications leverage Unwired Platform
advanced runtime services for data synchronization management that typically
requires data aggregation and distribution to diverse EIS.
Hybrid Apps
Hybrid apps offer an option that is a hybrid of HTML5 and
native development approaches. Hybrid apps provide a feature-rich web based user
interface and the simplicity of container-based deployment. The typical use case for
hybrid web container applications includes mobile workflows and lightweight
applications. Human resource management applications for vacation or travel approval are
examples of this occasionally connected application. Application requirements typically involve:
- Low data volume
- Simple, form-based user experience, involving notifications, lookup, and
action-decision forms
- Light-weight persistence
Hybrid Container applications leverage Unwired Platform services from within a
standards based HTML(5)/JavaScript environment, developers create applications using
Sybase Mobile Workflow Designer or using third party web tools. With this approach,
a container is developed natively for the target mobile operating system. Workflows
are developed for cross-platform use and deployed to the container.
Online Applications
With online mobile applications, information
access is adhoc in nature and access to data is not available in areas without network
access. Application requirements typically involve:
- Request/reply directly with the EIS
- Light-weight editing of form-based information
- Few screens and simple entries
Online applications are developed using the Sybase OData SDK or using a 3rd
Party SDK and the REST API. These applications leverage
Unwired Platform primarily synchronous request/reply
pattern for interaction with services. With OData SDK applications, developers
create applications that allow users to work (create, update data), connecting the
application to SAP® NetWeaver Gateway exposed data.