Developers play an important role in the design of the mobile application. But administrators control other important behaviors after a package is deployed.
Understanding the dynamic between these roles is critical in a mobile environment, especially with respects to data updates.
The distinction of these roles can be summarized as follows:
- Administrators need to co-ordinate the behavior of how information is relayed to and from the device user. Issues of synchronous versus asynchronous synchronization schedules, of state data in the consolidated database, and of outbound device client notification are the decisions of the administrator after packages are deployed. Because these issues affect the design and user-interface of the client application, the terms of this setup can be negotiated and agreed upon with development stakeholders.
- Developers need to design mobile business objects so they get data to and from the consolidated database and the enterprise information systems (EIS) effectively. However, they still need to understand where the client-side synchronization ends up. For example:
- Is data going just to the consolidated database or is it written to EIS synchronously?
- How stale data could be is a primary concern that must be addressed by the developer (that is, will data be updated regularly or predictably by a synchronization interval or more immediately by a data change notification)?