Aligo’s Omni Mobile Platform

Mobilizing your company’s core business applications requires more than just a wireless connection between a company Web server and users’ handheld devices. Somewhere between your back-end database and application servers, and your handheld devices, you need mobile middleware.

Mobile middleware compensates for device disparities by rendering standard application screens in device-specific ways, interacts with client business logic in the handheld device, ensures security  and aids in application deployment. A mobile middleware vendor also can help you mobilize a workforce automation system by offering time-saving guidance and software tools.

In our testing, we found that Aligo’s Omni Mobile Platform has the best environment for building, deploying and managing mobile applications. It supports virtually every type of wireless handheld device. It runs, by virtue of its Java application server  architecture, on many platforms. Its visual design environment makes building and reviewing the design of mobile applications a breeze.

Aligo’s Omni Mobile Platform sends device-specific screen data to handhelds; interacts with back-end servers and custom mobile client code; and gives application designers a rich, intuitive visual design environment.

Omni Mobile Platform consists of Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components and is a comprehensive Enterprise Java Beans application server environment. Imagine an IBM WebSphere or BEA Systems’  WebLogic environment especially geared to wireless handheld clients. Now add a handheld client visual design development tool. Voilà! You have Omni Mobile Platform. Its platform-neutral Java underpinnings made Omni Mobile Platform highly scalable in our tests.

Creating wireless application business logic with Omni Mobile Platform was child’s play. Via its .Net-based Data Access Layer integration between Java servers and Microsoft .Net devices, Omni Mobile Platform made the wireless handheld retrieval and display of data from Java Database Connectivity data sources (such as relational databases) quick and easy.

The Sync Engine component contains, among other modules, a Sync Cache module. The client and server have complementary Sync Caches for storing data on the handheld client and tracking its database operations. Omni Mobile Platform’s Sync Cache module requires a client-side Java Virtual Machine (JVM), such as pJava, MIDP or Personal Profile. In our tests, when we switched a handheld device from disconnected to connected state and back again, the Sync Engine modules transparently let our application continue running.

For the full report, go to https://nwfusion/reviews/2004/0209revmm.html