IBM Worklight hands-on workshop

Mobile devices are changing the way individuals and organizations operate. These devices are becoming a pervasive computing platform that helps improve employee productivity, allowing quick, informed decision making on the go, aided by the ability to access a wealth of real time information available regardless of (or specific to) location. Successful businesses realize that a mobile transformation is necessary today. According to a recent IBM Study, 75% of CIO's indicated that they will invest in mobile this year and that a mobile strategy is critical to ensure success. As part of their mobile strategy, a major consideration for many organizations is targeting multiple mobile platforms and a variety of form factors in a cost-effective manner. To accomplish this goal, organizations are looking to leverage standard-based technologies and tools, platforms that include mobile-optimized middleware and a mobile development platform which provides them with: (a) reduced time to deliver mobile applications (b) lowered development and test costs (c) improved mobile application interactions (d) appropriate level of control over smart mobile devices. Business to Employee (B2E) and Business to Consumer (B2C) mobile applications have different requirements and challenges. With B2E, there are many existing websites and applications for employees. How can organizations build a strategy such that when they create new websites, they have mobile in mind? For B2C, the challenges are different. When the applications are deployed to consumers, application maintenance becomes an issue. What do organizations do if they have a critical application defect? How do they ask the consumers to upgrade? How do they maintain version control? How can they retire a mobile application version gracefully? Lastly, mobile development presents another challenge. Traditionally, most companies use native platform-specific languages to write the mobile applications; each platform has a different SDK and coding language. To write for multiple platforms, they would have to write the same application specifically for each platform. This requires a lot of effort to create and maintain, and introduces consistency issues in applications across multiple platforms. Application usability may suffer because there is no reusability of common code. It is clear that there are a considerable number of issues that organizations need to think about when establishing a mobile strategy. IBM Worklight can be part of this strategy, allowing organizations to solve many of the challenges confronted with mobile application development. Some of the features that IBM Worklight Server supports include: - Enterprise Integration - Direct access to back-end systems - Leverage existing SOA services - Application Management - App distribution - App Version & Lifecycle management - Remote disabling apps - Direct Update - Push Notification service management - Analytics and Usage report - App Center - Security - Encrypted offline cache - Single sign-on mechanism - SSL encryption - Multi-factor authentication The target audience for this session was the typical industry/academic organization implementing a mobile strategy. Those who attended were interested in: (a) understanding the state and maturity of enterprise mobile technologies (b) learning what's new in the IBM mobile software portfolio (c) learning a mobile programming model (d) best practices and practical methods of implementing mobile applications. At the end of the workshop, participants learned to be familiar with a simple practical approach for developing hybrid mobile applications for heterogeneous platforms, to be able to identify and resolve some common tasks of mobile application development, to understand the basic principles and process behind implementing a mobile strategy, and to identify how the process can work for the organization.