Mobile Capability

This is a sample screenshot from IBM’s WebSphere Application Server 8 on an iPad.

Now switch gears for a minute and think about developing mobile applications with WebSphere. Suppose youre a developer tasked with creating a mobile version of a new application like this one. You might be also be given some UI mockups from a designer that look something like this, and the application may have requirements for interactive graphical business charts or graphs.

Users will expect a look, feel and user experience similar to the native device. But youve also been told that the business wants this to reach the broadest set of users, who are running iPhones, IPads, Android phones and tablets, and theyve heard that RIM has a new PlayBook tablet that may be important soon.

IBM has delivered new mobile capabilities via the WebSphere Web2.0 and Mobile Feature Pack for WebSphere platforms. The feature pack offers a supported UI library for building desktop and mobile Web applications. These are samples of controls in WebSphere that from an end-user point of view look and feel like the native interfaces on the device.

WAS 8 provides support for new touch-enabled, interactive UIs that are similar to whats on their device. IBM also has included richer visualization controls like charts and gauges.

IBM has included additional end-to-end application building blocks to help developers with things like file transfers between the mobile device and application services. These use REST patterns and are built on Java EE (Enterprise Edition) standards like JAX-RS.

WebSphere 8 supports UIs running in the browser, cross device with no special plug-ins, but based on standards like HTML5, SVG and JavaScript. Developers create the application UI just once and it can automatically select an appropriate device-specific theme. It uses the same modern Web standards and programming model across mobile as for desktop Web applications.

WebSphere 8 features integrated support for the OSGi Applications programming model to rapidly develop, deploy, manage and maintain modular applications using both Java EE and OSGi technologies.

Developer productivity is further enhanced using IBM Rational Application Developer. If developers use Rational Application Developer tools, they must obtain compatible versions of both Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Application Server Version 8.0 Beta from the following location: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/r/rad/

WebSphere Application Server for z/OS is available with this release. The product offers support for distributed, IBM i and z/OS operating systems.