LA JOLLA, Calif. - Although cool gadgets and awesome games make for some of the flashiest introductions at the annual DemoMobile show here, a small New Jersey start-up plans to introduce what amounts to mobile plumbing for the enterprise.

Open Terra will have, as do the other 36 companies selected for this mobile showcase, just six minutes to make Java messaging middleware sexy.

Open Terra’s mSolve software marries Java messaging with a graphical design toolset for quickly building Web browser screens and interfaces to backend databases.

Using mSolve applications, workers with a Java-enabled smartphone or any Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) device can run simple queries to corporate databases, such as inventory or customer-order checks. But they can also run far more complex operations, such as shifting order fulfillment to a second warehouse if the first one closes down. In fact, via a publish-subscribe feature, workers can be alerted automatically to events such as the warehouse closure.

The software is based in part on Open Terra's JaQue server software, which creates an application-to-application messaging framework based on the Java Messaging Service (JMS) specification.

The software also supports the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP), an early standard for letting data-enabled cell phones access content.

Open Terra's engineers have added several components to give mSolve a broader set of capabilities beyond the basic messaging framework:

- Mobile Design Studio, which is a browser-based graphical toolset for designing mSolve applications
- An array of ready-to-use software interfaces to corporate databases, to enterprise applications such as CRM, and to Web services based on SOAP, XML and other standards
- A rules engine to create a series of interrelated screens for stepping through complex business processes
- The mSolve agent, which is code that runs on the mobile device and can be downloaded automatically from a database of mSolve configurations

An application designer could use Studio to create screens a user would work with, graphically making connections to the appropriate databases or Web services and packaging it all into workflow based on the rules engine. When the designer hits the “Submit” button, an mSolve server program generates the needed Java code and creates and saves the client configurations. These configurations can be modified and distributed based on individual user names or group identities, such as "sales force."