The mobile industry is evolving rapidly with an increasing number of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. More people are accessing services via mobile devices than ever before. The mobile solution is directly impacting businesses, organizations, and their growing number of customers and partners. Even employees now expect to access services on a mobile device.
This chapter is an introduction to Worklight and where it fits into IBM Mobile Application Platform. At the end of this chapter, the reader will understand the basic components of IBM Worklight and how it contributes to building mobile applications. Currently, there are several approaches for mobile application development, such as the following:
Web development: This approach uses open web client programming modules, such as HTML5 and JavaScript.
Hybrid development: This approach uses the app source code that consists of the web code, executed within a native container that is provided by Worklight and native libraries.
Hybrid mixed: The developer adds arguments to the web code using the native language to create unique features and access native APIs that are available via JavaScript, such as APIs for a camera, an accelerometer, and other functionalities.
Native development: In this approach, the application is developed using native languages or transcoded into a native language via MAP tool's native appearance device capabilities, and performance.
To develop a similar application on a different platform requires a different level of expertise, which is expensive in terms of cost, time, and complexity. The following table outlines the major aspects of the different approaches to development. Reviewing this list can help you choose the approach that is ideal for your particular mobile application.
|
Native |
Hybrid |
Mobile Web | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Skills/tools |
|
|
|
|
Distribution |
App store |
App store |
Internet/online |
|
Development speed |
Slow |
Moderate |
Fast |
|
Device accessibility |
Full native device access |
Full native device access |
Partial device access |
|
Application maintenance |
Difficult |
Moderate |
Easy |
The hybrid development approach is about taking advantage of both native and mobile web development approaches. It benefits from the versatility of web technologies combined with powerful device features and SDK. It is well suited for a range of applications and can still provide good user experience.
The following table highlights the advantages and disadvantages of the hybrid approach:
|
Advantages of the hybrid approach |
Disadvantages of the hybrid approach |
|---|---|
|
Lower learning curve |
Performance of the application is slightly slower than native approach because of the data access across multiple layers |
|
Fast to develop and release | |
|
Easy to port, making it cost effective | |
|
Access to and support for native device functionality |
When escalating the business perspective to the mobile platform, we need to build an application for web-based responsive mobile apps with rich development environment for better performance and vast access control. IBM Worklight seems to be the most efficient and optimized to handle any kind of interactive and enterprise mobile application. Generally, the hybrid solutions are dependent on less secure or custom security identifiers, but Worklight's built-in security modules provides perfectly improvised frameworks to implement. Besides all of its classified and highly efficient features, it provides a complete studio to implement rich application development. For server-side security and implementation, it provides complete console management and accessibility for every component. It can also be utilized for creating a report and generating a complete view to study application statistics and performance. If you merge all cross-platforms into one, then IBM Worklight will be much trusted and efficient to use for business modernization and management.
IBM Worklight is an extensible mobile application platform that brings together many mobile capabilities into a single product and allows organizations to develop and deliver HTML5, hybrid and native applications, and deliver these applications with mobile middleware, security features, integrated data management, and analytics capabilities.