Sunday, October 21, 2012

Use Oracle SOA for mobile

We have seen a trend where more and more people start using mobile applications, people start to use there phones and tablets more and more and not only for social things but for all kinds of actions. As the mobile trend is well on its way and is still picking up speed we now see that the same trend is on its way in the enterprise market. Mail on your phone is already common. Large numbers of employees do get their business mail on their phone and use it to interact while not in the office. The next step is that companies are making applications mobile so they are available to employees 24 hours a day 7 days a week on any device.

Issue is however that enterprise applications are commonly complex and often consist out of a multitude of applications and servers. Building a simple mobile application is not that easy and you have to pull information and interact with multiple applications when you are building a single application that can be used in a mobile way. Secondly, enterprise applications are commonly not equipped to be made mobile and are often "old".

Oracle is providing a couple of things that can make your life a lot easier as an architect and as a developer. If you are developing a platform and application that is intended to make enterprise applications (legacy applications) available on a mobile device you do want to look at the Oracle SOA suite and you do want to look at Oracle ADF.

Oracle SOA Suite;
The Oracle SOA suite can help you to design and build a way to interact with a multitude of backoffice systems and tie this into a single point of interaction for your mobile application platform. For example, if you need information from two different systems pulled into your mobile application, do an interaction on this data and ship it to a number of other systems it is not making sense to build all those interactions and connections into your mobile application. It would make more sense to create a communication and interaction model in your mobile application server and use the Oracle SOA suite to take care of all the interactions for you.

This will help you simplify the interaction between your mobile application and the server used to connect your mobile application to and all the possible backoffice systems you need to interact with.

Oracle ADF;
Oracle ADF (Oracle Application Development Framework) is a framework developed by Oracle to develop Java applications. If you are about to develop mobile applications and the needed background services in combination with SOA this is one of the things you do want to look into. Oracle is providing a lot of functions out of the box to interact with the Oracle SOA components as well as building mobile applications for multiple devices.

The below video is showing a quick guide into developing mobile applications with the help of Oracle ADF.

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