Going mobile using IBM® Worklight®

ASIST INTEGRATION SOLUTIONS FACT SHEET

ASIST drinks its own Champagne by developing and deploying an internally used Mobile App for their consultants by using IBM® Worklight®

ASIST uses Time Cockpit, which is an offline-capable SaaS (Software as a Service) solution from Software Architects gmbh, for their consultants to report their daily hours worked on projects. The default interfaces to Time Cockpit are a Windows Client Application or a Web Browser interface. As we are always in a learning mood for new technologies and as we are tightly coupled to Enterprise platforms, we have spent our time learning, developing and deploying on our local servers, an IBM® Worklight® mobile interface to the Time Cockpit application.

Integration, security and application management

Most enterprises have legacy applications with an enor-mous business value which they want to perceive. Work-light®, as an IBM tool, has all the technology available to connect to these legacy applications by using the best breed of middleware. These connections are developed in so called “Adapters”. In the ASIST Mobile Time Cockpit application we use adapters to connect to .NET Web Ser-vices which are themselves connected to the Time Cockpit Cloud, as you can see in the below architecture. The ASIST Mobile Time Cockpit application is specifically built as a Hybrid Application, this means that in Worklight® Studio the Project consists mainly of common codebase. If for a platform dependent user experience, the developers would like to write platform specific code this is possible by the use of the low-level API’s that are available in Wok-light® Studio. The adapters run under the secure control of Worklight® Server which is deployed in a secure J2EE con-tainer, Websphere Application Server in our case, but can also be Tomcat for example. Management issues such as having the knowledge of who installed which version of the App or having your own, private App Store are also covered by the Worklight® platform in the form of the Application center. Release management, monitoring usage of your App, push-ing out new versions of the App are all managed by Work-light® Console. (Find more information about these Worklight® tools on the backside of this document)

Mobile Web, Hybrid or Native Apps ?

Once you’ve decided you want to develop a Mobile App, the main question that rises is whether you are going to develop it for a particular device, a Native App in this case, or if you are

going to develop a Hybrid App or a Mobile Web App, with HTML5, which is OS independent. The strengths of Worklight® are easily justifiable as the developer can make the choice between the three different approaches. The ASIST Mobile Time Cockpit application is a Hybrid application that has a native look and feel on the different devices.

ASIST - Slachthuislaan 1.00.01 - 3000 Leuven, Belgium - Phone +32 16 20 18 75 - info@asist.be

Love at first sight When Technical Director Paul Pilotto experienced Worklight® for the first time, he was convinced of the power of this platform. “Worklight® is not just a development tool”, he said, “it is a complete end-to-end platform that supports the enterprise ideas. You can develop a very specific native application but if you are looking for a broader implementation, developing an App once and deploying it on all the Industry Standard mobile platforms, Worklight® is the right answer”. The fact that there is no need to develop native code and still have full control over the devices’ capabilities through the native OS by using the low-level API’s is a perfect programming paradigm for companies who do want to develop Mobile Apps in an enterprise context in order to maintain the code of the Apps for different devic-es in one place with one tool.

Figure 1 : Time Cockpit Windows client with ASIST Mobile App on iPhone

Figure 2 : Architecture of the ASIST Time Cockpit Mobile App

ASIST - ADVICE IN SOFTWARE, IT SYSTEMS AND TECHNIQUES

We have an innovative, entrepreneurial culture, emphasizing on teamwork and performance. In 1995 ASIST started as a company specialized in Application Development. Today we advise our clients with deep technical competences in several areas for major organizations and institutions worldwide. This deep technical knowledge is bundled in the ASIST Integration Solutions Competence Centers:

Software Asset Management Application Lifecycle Management

Enterprise Modernization

IBM Systems and Mobile With ASIST Insourcing Services we provide highly skilled professionals in these Competence Centers to enforce YOUR teams for longer periods of time.

Going mobile using IBM® Worklight®

Lexicon

Time Cockpit : is an offline-capable Software as a Service time tracking solution from Software Architects gmbh.

Eclipse : is an open source Java IDE

IDE : Integrated Development Environment

Native Mobile OS : Apple iOS, Windows Mobile, Android, Black-Berry OS

Native Apps : are developed for the specific device running a mobile OS. For Apple for example this is Objective-C.

Hybrid Apps : run on the device like native apps but run inside a native container and enables access to the device capabilities such as the accelerometer, camera and local storage.

Legacy applications : are applications in which companies have invested a considerable amount of effort, mostly running on Mainframes or midrange computers, but still representing mag-nificent business value.

Our offering Step into : We introduce you to the principles and the possibili-

ties of Mobile development and deployment with Worklight®

Baseline : Together with you we develop and deploy a first, simple, Mobile App with Worklight®

Refresh : We follow up on the new features and functionalities of Worklight® and provide you with that information.

Project : Your whish with Worklight® is our command

ASIST - Slachthuislaan 1.00.01 - 3000 Leuven, Belgium - Phone +32 16 20 18 75 - info@asist.be

IBM® Worklight® IBM® Worklight® is more than a just an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). IBM® Worklight® is a platform that enables enterprises to develop, deploy

and manage their Mobile Apps for most industry recognized smartphones and tablets. Enterprises that want to build Mobile Apps in a hybrid or native way, but that do not want to develop and maintain separate source code for each mobile OS, should use IBM® Worklight®.

Worklight® Studio, which is an Eclipse based IDE , enables de-

velopers to perform all the coding and integration tasks that are required to develop a fully operational mobile application, opti-mized for the different mobile OS, combining HTML5 and mobile OS native code. The power of this IDE is that there is a separation of User Interface specific code and Adapters that connect to backend Web Services. The power of this architecture for enter-prises having lots of valuable business logic running on enterprise platforms is that when this business logic is accessible via web-service technology (SOA) it is reusable and integrated in Work-light.

Worklight® Server is the secure and scalable middleware that

serves as the gateway between the adapters and the backend services and it runs under the control of an application server such as Websphere Application Server (WAS).

Worklight® Device Runtime Components offer runtime client

application program interfaces (API) which are libraries that are integrated into the locally stored app code and which are de-signed to enhance security, governance and usability.

Worklight® Application Center can be seen as an Enterprise App

Store that manages the distribution of production-ready mobile apps

Worklight® Console is an administrative tool to manage and

monitor the usage of the mobile apps and its adapters and offers push services for release management.