As an enterprise mobility strategy firm, we have seen the challenges that our clients face with fragmentation across mobile device platform complexity, trying to keep up with ever changing platform updates and form factor evolution. As application patterns shift over time, development teams use IBM Worklight to optimize integrations; reuse existing skills and tools; and deliver mobile apps faster to more devices and users. Some of the primary differentiators we discuss with our clients include:

Specifically, consider the research that we did for cross-platform development. The increased simplicity that Worklight provides is clear when we study its effectiveness in handling the nearly 8 iOS updates that occurred in the past year:

By using Worklight, there was a cost savings of 76% when compared to doing the same work natively. In addition, we also reduced risks that are inherent to application updates by using governance capabilities.

To fully understand the value that IBM Worklight can provide in your mobile application development environment, see this recently released report by Forrester that was done for IBM: The Total Economic Impact of IBM’s Worklight Platform (April 2013).

What ROI has your development teams realized by using Worklight?

Aaron Shook is a Senior Software Architect with PointSource. He has over seven years of experience in enterprise and systems application development and architecture with experience in a large number of technologies, programming languages, and design methodologies.

Members of our PointSource executive team are attending Innovate 2013: The IBM Technical Summit.

Erik Burckart, Chief Technical Officer and Stephanie Trunzo, Chief Creative Officer will be there from Monday through Thursday. They are ready to talk with you in person about strategy and opportunities in enterprise mobility for your business.

If you don’t catch them out and about, look for them in one of the following sessions:

• Mobile development in the cloud (MDEV-1711A); June 3, 3-4 PM. Erik is co-presenting with Derek Baron of IBM
• Developing for the cloud, in the cloud (CLD-2572) June 3, 3-4 PM. Stephanie is co-presenting with Scott Rich of IBM
• Panel discussion: Current and future mobile strategy (MDEL-2204 Asia 3) June 5, 4:15-5:15 PM – Join Stephanie and IBM Mobile experts Dirk Nicol, Leigh Williamson, Neil Patterson for this discussion.

And don’t forget to join them for some fun! We are proud to join Tasktop, Siemens, and IBM to co-sponsor the OSLC Community Hospitality Suite, Tuesday from 8-10 PM. With the recent announcement from OASIS about OSLC being its newest Member Section, we really have something to celebrate, in addition to the Mobile User Group (oslc.mobi) we co-founded. There are a limited number of VIP invitations available; register here to let us know if you’d like to attend.

We look forward to meeting you in Orlando!

At IBM Impact, I co-presented with Todd Kaplinger, Senior Technical Staff Member of IBM Software Group, on building exceptional mobile applications with IBM Worklight. Our goal was to illustrate how IBM Worklight solves some of the most common challenges that companies who are new to the mobile space encounter.

Design and development for mobile applications is very different from that for web applications. As we’ve worked with clients, four specific pain points occur frequently for developers and architects as they move from web to mobile development.

1. Mobile device platform complexity

To say that mobile operating systems are released very frequently is an understatement, especially when you consider there were approximately 8 iOS updates and 12 Android updates in the past year. These updates often break applications that are written in the language that is native to the device (Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android), which requires constant upkeep of the applications every time a new operating system is released. By using the IBM Worklight platform, you are able to write applications that work across all device platforms (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry) and write to a platform that is constantly updated to work with the latest operating system levels. This relieves you of the burden of updating your applications every time a new operating system update comes out. Additionally, Worklight allows you to use standard web interface languages (HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS) to build your application across all platforms so that there is no need to learn multiple complex languages in order to have an application that works across multiple platforms.

2. Connections to enterprise systems

Connectivity to enterprise systems in the mobile world is more difficult than it was for web. Platforms like Java Enterprise Edition and .NET have evolved to the point where standard methods for connecting to legacy systems exist in all shapes and sizes. In mobile, however, your options for connectivity are limited because most of your code that needs to interact with the systems will be written in JavaScript. IBM Worklight provides powerful mechanisms called adapters that allow you to interact with the Worklight server via JavaScript and then do the heavy lifting of connecting with your enterprise systems with Java.

3. Mobile-specific design concerns

Mobile applications are not web applications and must be treated differently. The common patterns are different, the usage is different, and the expectations are different; on top of all of those factors, the users are typically power users, so creating a subpar mobile experience will alienate your best customers. Worklight’s third party libraries provide common mobile patterns and allow users to create sophisticated mobile applications by simply dragging and dropping these from a palette. Additionally, Worklight provides easy-to-use mobile simulators that allows developers to test changes with the click of a button.

4. Internet connectivity loss

With web applications, we could always assume that users had an internet connection; lost connections or timeouts were not expected to be handled gracefully because they did not occur very often, and simply displaying standard “Page not found” or “Connection timeout” browser pages was considered acceptable. “Failover” scenarios like these ones are not an option with mobile. Users can lose connectivity by bouncing between mobile towers, going under tunnels, and countless other everyday scenarios, and your application must handle these gracefully. Fortunately, IBM Worklight provides hooks into the device that allow it to detect when a connection has dropped and handle the situation gracefully. Additionally, it provides the concept of an advance offline storage mechanism called the JSONStore. This store allows users to work with data while offline and then synchronize when the connection is obtained again.

You can read more about IBM Worklight by viewing the Building Exceptional Applications with IBM Worklight presentation. What have been your pain points in moving from web application to mobile app development?

Aaron Shook is a Senior Software Architect with PointSource. He has over seven years of experience in enterprise and systems application development and architecture with experience in a large number of technologies, programming languages, and design methodologies.