ENTERPRISE MOBILE APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT WITH WAVEMAKER Abstract This whitepaper talks about the requirements of modern day Enterprise Mobile Applications and how WaveMaker can simplify and speed up the overall delivery of Enterprise Mobile Applications. Karthick Viswanathan WaveMaker, Inc.
Introduction With every Enterprise adopting a Mobile first initiative to Application Development, the need for quick rapid mobile application development is greater than ever. Having said that, the methods, tools and development technologies used for mobile application development within Enterprises over the past few years, don t match the expectations of easier and faster delivery of Mobile Applications. Also the requirements for Mobile Applications within enterprises have also changed. In this Paper we will discuss the various approaches to Mobile Application Development. We will talk about the capabilities required by Enterprises in today Mobile Applications. And finally we will see how WaveMaker can help Enterprises to deliver Mobile Applications faster, easier while adhering to Security, User Experience and Integration needs. With the emergence of Modern Rapid application Delivery platforms, Enterprises now have the capability to solve the continuous problem of delivering Apps at faster, easier while keeping intact Enterprise Architecture expectations. This Paper will focus on WaveMaker as a Rapid Application Delivery platform for developing Mobile Hybrid Applications. What are my Options today? There are multiple options for Enterprise developers to develop mobile applications today. As with any technology choice there are pros and cons of each approach. Let s understand each approach and analyze which one of this would be suitable for modern day Enterprises looking for rapid delivery of mobile applications. Web Responsive In the late 90 s as mobile devices with the ability to host a browser inside them, enabled viewing web applications on the mobile device browser. The technology was very naïve and immature at that point and over the years, this technology has become very sophisticated and feasible. Today s web responsive applications built using modern HTML5, JavaScript and Bootstrap CSS technologies are user friendly, and visually interactive to be viewed on the browsers of mobile devices. However they are heavy on performance and cannot match the sophistication and customization needs of mobile applications. Native applications In the late 2000 s we saw the emergence of Apps and App Stores. Today, every serious business whose entire business model depends on the single app, has a native mobile app for customers to use. Native Mobile Apps are built and designed for each device platform independently and offer highly customized and sophisticated user interfaces and interactions. However they are cost prohibitive and required highly skillful labor to develop them for each platform using device platform specific programming language. Mobile Hybrid (Best of Both Worlds) How do I get the best of both worlds? As an End User I would like good User Interactions and User Interface. As an Enterprise I would like to meet the growing demands of developing Mobile Apps at a rapid pace that keeps up with business needs. This is where Mobile Hybrid Applications come to the rescue. Mobile Hybrid Applications are developed using standard HTML5, JavaScript technologies that developers are used to and at the same time give the look and feel close to Hybrid Applications as well as allow the Gartner Says by 2016, More Than 50 Percent of Mobile Apps Deployed Will be Hybrid
Applications to access Device Capabilities. They use Cross Platform technologies like Apache Cordova, PhoneGap that builds the HTML5 applications for the target platform on which the application needs to be provisioned. See below a chart that shows the comparison of all the 3 development methodologies. The chart uses various attributes of application development and shows how each development approach fares in comparison with the others. Comparison of Mobile Application Development Methodologies Enterprise Mobile Application Development Requirements As Enterprises look at deploying Mobile Applications for internal as well as external applications, there are a set of capabilities required for the Applications to be feasible and meet the Enterprise architectural expectations. These are the following, Look & Feel Former NYTimes.com Design Director Khoi Vinh captured his common frustration in his seminal 2007 article. If it looks like a cow, swims like a dolphin and quacks like a duck, it must be Enterprise Software It was rightly said, as Enterprise applications lacked good UI and user experience. Over the years, Consumerisation of the Internet has forced a relook at Enterprise applications from the User Experience stand point. Today advancement of web technologies has made it possible to develop good looking applications. The bar on design for Mobile Applications has gone up even higher. Applications are today are custom designed based on the guidelines of the platform. See the figure below that shows the same widget customized on different devices.
Customization of look and feel of widgets based on device platforms Security Every Enterprise relies on a security infrastructure to keep its applications secure. With Mobile Applications the need for Security is even higher, as the risk is higher due to mobile workforce, location independence and employee personal devices being used. With more breaches happening in today s world, Enterprise are very wary of Security within the applications. Applications need to support strong Authentication, fine grained Authorization and Custom Data Security based on business imperatives. It is essential that these apps can integrate to Enterprise Identity Management systems like LDAP, AD, SSO and IDM (Identity Management Systems like IBM Tivoli, Oracle Access Manager, CA SiteMinder and Ping Identity Systems to name a few. Data Security LDAP AD Enterprise Security AuthN AuthZ SSO Cross Platform Development Every Enterprise Application needs to be available on multiple platforms. These platforms include and not limited to Android, Apple and Windows. The cost of developing Mobile Application for each platform is high and also impeded the speed of delivering application to the business. Modern day cross platform technologies Apache Cordova help in addressing this by allowing developers to code the application once and allowing it to be built for various platforms without having to rewrite the application. The answer to meeting the need to develop Apps at pace of Business needs is cross platform development. Integration Enterprise data is stored in multitude of places, from Databases, File Systems, Legacy Systems, ERP Systems, Cloud Platforms and custom business logic. Mobile Applications that need to access this data, need to have an easier and faster way to integrate to these systems and manage the data. The ability to integrate seamlessly to these systems via APIs (REST, SOAP as well as Web Services) from within the Mobile Applications can make it easier and faster to develop. IT is very important to provide a clean interface and separation between Mobile Applications User Interface and integration via APIs to backend systems. Today Enterprises are creating micro services and developing apps using loosely coupled architectures. Mobile Apps are developed using Services (REST, Web Services). As the world moves towards creating services around every asset, there is a greater need to simplify the ability to integrate Mobile Apps to services.
Leverage Device Capabilities Today's Mobile Devices are becoming highly sophisticated in terms of features and functionality offered. Mobile Application can benefit in user experience and features offered by leveraging the device/hardware capabilities. Developers need a simpler way to access the device features and use them within the app to make them rich and contextual. Open Standards Based Platform While there are many platforms that offer Mobile Application Development, Enterprises are very wary of getting locked into proprietary and closed platforms. Mobile Applications can benefit from using Open Standard Enterprise Technologies in the app and thereby future proof investment and platform choice made. Rapid Application Delivery CIOs and CXOs are looking for faster innovation and time to market for mobile applications. The constant complaint from senior management is the lack of agility and speed for delivering mobile applications. This can be attribute to a number of factors and not limited to complexity of developing apps, creating apps for each platform, highly laborious process of developing apps using traditional coding approaches and finally lot of effort and time to setup, install and manage the overall development infrastructure of Application development. Here is where modern Rapid Application Delivery platforms like WaveMaker can help in greatly simplifying and providing a codeless development platform to design, develop and deploy Hybrid Mobile applications. WaveMaker Visual Mobile Application Development Methodology WaveMaker has a unique visual approach to mobile app development. Developers have to just drag and drop the UI controls onto a WYSIWYG canvas and see the user experience come alive right in front of their eyes. Not just UI, but also other facets of Application Development and Delivery like integrations with Database, Internal as well as External Services via APIs, Configuring of enterprise grade app security, deployment and go-live are all done visually in nature. The Mobile Applications code is automatically generated both for the front end as well as the backend components. Once the developer is done developing the application, there is a 1-Click Build option that gives developers the ability to create the target installer for various cross platform devices. The same application code base is used to create variants of the application for say, Android (apk file), IOS (ipa file), Windows Phone App etc. The Device specific app can then be provisioned to the respective App Store for allowing end users to download on their respective devices.
Advantages of Visual Application Development Visual app building addresses the two most important obstacles for an organization in app building - Shortage of skilled resources for Mobile Application Development and Building Mobile Apps in lesser time. With WaveMaker, developers get a simple WYSIWYG interface, to develop web as well as mobile hybrid applications. Developers no longer have to worry about learning complex programming languages for various device platforms. Existing Developers familiar with JavaScript, HTML can quickly develop Mobile Apps. We saw tremendous productivity gain using WaveMaker we can build apps 61% faster with 98% less code SVP, Fortune 500 bank Additionally, lot of design patterns are put in place for the code that is generated using WaveMaker. WaveMaker automatically generates code, based on best practices, using AngularJS, Spring, Hibernate and other open source technologies. This means Developers are happy as they get to develop Enterprise grade Mobile Applications faster, easier and with good quality. For the CIOs, looking to churn faster mobile Apps, WaveMaker provides ability develop apps in days as opposed to Months or Years. Also, Enterprises can adopt a single platform to let departments, which typically operate out of the control of IT (called shadow IT problem), to build departmental mobile apps. Shadow IT has been a perennial problem for IT since it is, more often than not, responsible for information security issues in an organization. With WaveMaker, IT team can instantly provision a new account using WaveMaker and let departmental mobile apps be built by developers with standardization, best practices and approved stack. This will consolidate all the different platforms into just one platform. Continuous deployment and Testing A unique feature of the WaveMaker RAD platform is that at any point of time, the current stage of the application can be viewed and tested. The application would be presented as it would appear for an end user and be instantly tested. This allows business managers, developers, QA and all stakeholders during app building to ensure that the application is building up as per the initial laid out requirements. In addition, WaveMaker platform s inbuilt continuous deployment capabilities allows a smooth and instant transition of the app from one stage of the app lifecycle to the next one. For instance, developers can instantly deploy the app in a designated QA environment, without any worries about provisioning hardware and installing the software stacks. Enterprise Mobile Architecture WaveMaker provides a very clean separation of client side UI and server side components for Mobile Applications. The User Interface is developed using HTML5, AngularJS and bootstrap. There is a native wrapper using Apache Cordova that gets integrated with the client side application in order to get access to device features. The client side application is built for individual
device platforms Android, Apple as well as Windows. Enterprise Integration is handled by the server side application. The Mobile Application communicates with the Server side application using REST APIs. The Server side components provide integration to Database, Security Systems, Legacy Systems, Web Services and any custom business logic. This way any Mobile App built using WaveMaker gets seamless integration capabilities with backend services required in enterprise scenarios. WaveMaker and Agile Development Agile development is a proved methodology to reduce time and effort in an app delivery cycle. WaveMaker app delivery works complementary to the agile methodology, where visual development, instant testing and deployment fits nicely into the agile project cycle. More features that make WaveMaker a Winner If the features mentioned in the previous section is not good enough to satisfy, here are more features that will make the CIOs happy. Open Standards based Mobile Apps that are built using the WaveMaker RAD platform, are based on proven open source technologies that are being used by millions of users around the world. No Vendor Lock in WaveMaker RAD platform does not let the vendor locked into the platform. It auto generates code based on open standards. It allows the code to be exported out of the platform any time and any number of times. It does not license its run time libraries, so that you can deploy into any runtime platform, not just WaveMaker s runtime platform. Code and extend app capabilities WaveMaker allows multiple extension points that allows custom coding. You can create your own Java libraries and import into WaveMaker as a Java service. You can create your own custom UI styling and extensions using JavaScript. You can integrate any external AngularJS and jquery UI controls into the WaveMaker platform as a drag-and-drop UI widget. The generated code is Maven compliant and you can instantly import to any IDE, like Eclipse and work on it. In essence, you have total control over your platform. There is more Learn more about WaveMaker Rapid Application Development Platform for Mobile as well as Responsive Web Apps at www.wavemaker.com