Building applications for mobile devices
These days almost everyone has one or more mobile devices, ranging from Smartphones to tablets. From a business perspective, widespread use of mobile devices is useful, as it allows immediate access to information for employees who work remotely and/or travel frequently. Customers also have easy access to information about products and services.
While the “App Stores” offer thousands of mobile applications, employees need mobile applications that will integrate with line-of-business (LOB) applications and unstructured information. Mobile applications built for customers, must help them in their relationship with the company by informing them about the status of purchases, providing information about products and allowing customers to ask questions or place orders.
Developers who work with RPG or COBOL on IBM i servers will find building applications for mobile devices a very different experience. Mobile devices are smaller, operate on a limited power supply, store much less data on the device and human interaction is touch. The devices have additional capabilities including cameras, location awareness and gyroscopes. Mobile applications can be browser based, native to the mobile device, or a hybrid of both. Native applications written for mobile devices don't use RPG or COBOL as the development language, and the device constraints require different application architectures and design principles.
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Using JSON to Build Efficient Applications
As modern Web applications have become increasingly interactive and data centric, techniques have been sought to make these applications more efficient. A major breakthrough in this area was the advent of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML). Since then, developers have continued to squeeze even more performance and efficiency out of every byte. One way to achieve these gains has been the use of JSON.
Let’s first understand what JSON is and what it isn’t. The formal international standard for JSON is RFC 4627. Douglas Crockford, the originator of the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) specification, describes JSON as “a lightweight data-interchange format.” It’s based on two key ideas — the use of name/value pairs and an ordered list of values. Since these conventions exist in nearly every significant programming language, this makes JSON a good solution across many platforms. While JSON is often described as a subset of Javascript, JSON itself is not a language. Nor is it a document format. JSON is a way to store information in an organized, easy-to-access way. It's both human- and machine-readable and is easily parsed. Most importantly, JSON is an open, text-based data exchange format that provides simplicity and programming language independence.
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Using JavaScript Frameworks for Building Business Applications
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the explosion of information, mobile devices, tablets and the ability to consume and access information from anywhere in the world. Web applications are being built at an ever-increasing pace to satisfy the need for information and deliver content-rich, user-friendly applications to users. With the increased demand being placed on IT departments to build and deliver business applications, HTML, CSS and JavaScript are being used to develop creative, immersive and cutting-edge Web applications.
One of the trickiest tasks any Web developer faces is the ability to build and deliver the same functionality and richness across multiple browsers and devices of various form factors. The introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 makes this task even more challenging as not all current browsers support the same HTML5 and CSS3 features. Browser vendors are incrementally adding support for new HTML5 and CSS3 features with periodic browser updates, which further complicates the matter. Continue reading “Using JavaScript Frameworks for Building Business Applications” »
Performance is a lifetime experience!
Performance is not only a highly complex topic but also a moving target as business demands and technologies are constantly changing. What you design today as a highly performing business application may turn out to be a millstone around your neck within a few short years with the current rate of change. It's important to constantly evaluate performance to ensure the best experience for your customers, whether external or internal to your business.
There are many factors that can impact the performance of a business application. This blog only touches on a few of those factors at a very high level, and is focused specifically on the IBM i platform. Since every business application is unique, the impact each of these factors may have on the performance may vary considerably. Continue reading “Performance is a lifetime experience!” »
Reaching for the Sky – Cloud Computing
Number One on Gartner's list of the "Top Ten Strategic Technologies" for two years running (2010 and 2011) has been Cloud Computing. If your organization has not already begun to redeploy hardware or software resources to the Cloud, it may be in your budget for the coming year.
In fact, "the Cloud" has become such a common term that even the average consumer will have a sense of what this means. From a simplistic standpoint, the Cloud is the virtual network called the Internet where we can all connect and run an endless variety of applications - everything from email to social media to online shopping and so much more - without need to understand the complex technical infrastructure we are accessing.
From the standpoint of an organization with a rich set of enterprise applications and hardware/network infrastructure to manage their business, there is a lot more to understand about this evolving capability. For businesses that can effectively make use of Cloud Computing, the potential business benefits are significant. Continue reading “Reaching for the Sky – Cloud Computing” »