Sybase® WorkSpace tooling supports the development of mobile applications that allows you to easily combine content from a variety of sources, customize the display of the content to meet the requirements of various mobile devices, and deliver the application to any number of mobile devices across numerous mobile operating systems.
Mobile development features include:
Unwired Accelerator
Use Sybase WorkSpace with Sybase® Unwired Accelerator to quickly and easily extend ERP applications, such as SAP, business intelligence reports such as Business Objects, help desk application such as Remedy, as well as Web applications, databases, and Web services to a large variety of mobile devices. Enable mobile application development and quick deployment of mobile business applications and Business Objects to mobile operating systems.
Mobile application development
Mobile applications provide interactive access to an enterprise system, such as SAP, Business Objects, Remedy Action Request, databases, web services and present content from simple web pages.
WorkSpace with Unwired Accelerator allows you to develop mobile applications and add dynamic content from Web sites, Web services, JSPs/ASPs, XML sources, database elements, and other sources. You can add postprocessing options to your mobile application, such as charts and graphs, filters, and triggers to deliver content that meets your business needs.
Unwired Accelerator comes preloaded with approved mobile applications. You can use these applications as a basis for creating new applications, or for testing purposes.
See also Developing a Mobile Application.
Mobile template development
You can associate multiple templates with a single mobile application. Each template is associated with a particular viewer, such as a Web browser or a mobile device. This allows the rendering of the same content (mobile application) to be specialized on a device-by-device basis. Default templates for all devices provide off-the-shelf support for all mobile devices. In addition you can create, modify, and administer templates on an application-by-application basis.
You can also create and generate custom templates that define the layout of the mobile application based on the device type, mobile application content, and other considerations. Templates can be generated for PDA, BlackBerry, WAP-WML, WAP-HTML, Smartphone, Nokia, Palm and other mobile devices.
Unwired Accelerator comes preloaded with approved templates, which supply different styles and appearances for various mobile devices. You can use these templates as a basis for creating new ones and for testing purposes.
See also Mobile Templates.
Web service support
Integrate mobile development with Web services by wrapping mobile applications in SOAP services, and then publishing the Web service information to a UDDI Registry for public consumption.
See also Creating Web Service Elements.
Content Capture
Content Capture allows re-purposing of Web-based applications and content. A developer identifies the content and source using a point and click wizard. The desired content can be a single field or more complex structure. The Content Capture engine analyzes the selected Web content and builds a signature that can identify that content uniquely. Later when a user requests the content, the Content Capture engine uses the signature and pattern matching to re-locate the content. The benefit of this approach is that if the content has moved or been updated, the engine is likely to succeed in finding the updated content. This is a much better solution for dynamic environments than screen-scraping approaches, which typically fail and simply return an error if the content or location have changed.
See also Creating Web Capture Elements.
Advanced Mobile Applications
Using the mobile application development tools in WorkSpace lets you build interactive business application mobile applications to solve multi-staged business problems. These applications use information from one mobile application for continued processing in another mobile application. When these mobile applications are combined to interact and create collaborative functionality, the applications become a virtual mobile application. Advanced mobile application development includes:
Click-across applications – click-across functionality lets you create events that start when a user clicks the content in an application table. For example, a user can click a grid value in one mobile application to refresh another mobile application’s content on the page using the grid value as a parameter to be applied to the refreshed mobile application. You can define an event that takes its input value from any cell in the grid, not just from the cell in which the event is defined. The source cell can even be in a hidden column.
See also Defining Broadcast Events.
Grid rules – using grid rules enables you to create user-defined rules that alter the appearance and content for mobile application elements that generate table-based content (such as a database element or a Web element that is captured as a grid). For example, you can use rules to filter unwanted records or fields, and to display column header information. Additional rules allow you to add new records or fields, and alter record and field content. You can take existing content, for example, from a remote Web site or a database, and alter the presentation to a different format.
See also Using Rules and Record Layout.
Charting mobile applications – the Chart Definition wizard lets you chart mobile applications without programming. Charting mobile applications lets you create graphical representations of tabular data. Data can display in one of three chart formats—bar, pie, or line. You can create a chart for mobile applications containing any element type that has input parameters and a grid or table with structured output. You can chart any number of variables, as long as the data is contained in a tabular form (a grid or table).
See also Charting Mobile Applications.
Answers Anywhere
Answers Anywhere is a patented Sybase technology that enables users to ask any question in the form of a natural language queries, for example “How many customers in my area have product xyz ?”, and receive the answers over SMS, Email, Voice or the Web. This technology provides significant time savings for mobile users looking for information. Instead of having the user identify the enterprise information system that might contain the information, and then log in and attempt to find the information, Answers Anywhere allows the user to simply ask questions, and the Answers Anywhere Network Agent searches web-based sources and the appropriate, authorized systems based on the questions, user roles and permissions and knowledge of available systems and content and returns results to the mobile device.
See also Using Answers Anywhere.
Mobile device support
Facilitate connections to mobile devices through a browser, enabling both connected and disconnected network access.
Unwired Accelerator supports both connected and disconnected modes for "always available" for mobile users who may lose their wireless connection but still need access to the most recent available information. To support "always available" access, Unwired Accelerator uses optional components for different device types.
Personalization
Use the Mobile Personalization profile view to configure application parameter input values to be filled in from adapters that extract values from other sources; for example, values that have been stored in the back-end database. When you configure an application input field to use a personalization adapter, the adapter is invoked at runtime to provide values for preconfigured key fields. The input fields of application instances that belong to different users can receive input values based on each user, providing customization of an application's content and its execution on a per-user basis.
See also Personalizing Mobile Application Content.
Administration
Use the Mobile Administration profile view to create and manage UA users, roles, and resources. See also Administration.
Deployment
Use the MobiLink profile view to deploy mobile applications to mobile devices. See also Mobilink.
Automation
Use the Mobile Automation view to automate the processing of your mobile applications by using agents, agent servers, and adapters.
See also Mobile Automation
Mobile Pages
A mobile page is a collection of mobile applications that displays in a portal environment. You can also use mobile pages and mobile page groups as containers for applications that you deploy to mobile devices.
See also Developing Mobile Pages.
Mobile Page Groups
A page group is a set of pages that are grouped together. All pages are organized within page groups, which appear in the browser window. When you create pages, you can choose the page group you want your page to appear in.
See also Developing Mobile Page Groups.
Mobile Catalogs
Mobile catalogs are for portal use only, they do not display on mobile devices. Mobile catalogs allow you to hierarchically organize collections of applications making them easy to manage and deploy.
See also Developing Mobile Catalogs.
Composite Applications
Composite applications bind existing applications into a common operation, sharing data between the applications and allowing them to operate as a virtual application. Composite applications can include individual applications on one page (a application flow) or serialized applications on multiple pages (a page flow), or for mobile applications, an application with tabs (a tab flow).
The Composite Application Wizard lets you create composite applications, and the composite application editor allows you to add content and define properties for the composite application.
See also Creating Composite Applications.
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