Mobile RADlets
The Mobile Killer Apps
Abstract
The hidden power of mobile applications being the ability to use it for personal and business needs rather than pure communication and entertainment. Mobile users are still looking for that elusive killer app that will bring out the power of a mobile device. This article talks about RADlets and how a reusable component framework would impact the development of new mobile applications and the opening up of new opportunities.Download Whitepaper  |
The State Of Mobility
Beyond phone calls
Mobile devices like cellphones have evolved from pure communication devices into sophisticated multimedia and internet access devices. The connected nature of the device has led to a lot of activity and development in the area of network applications and services. Most mobile applications today provide connectivity to a web service or pull news and rss feeds from websites. The power of a mobile device to run regular applications for everyday use is still underutilised. Partly due to the fact that mobile devices and phones are strategically marketed by the service provider to promote more network usage and in turn lead to greater revenue.
The Hidden Power Of Mobility
On the other hand with substantial computing power being packed into mobile devices, there is no reason why they cannot be used to run everyday applications. Applications that are not meant for staying in touch and accessing web services, but those built to hold your information. One of the stumbling blocks for adopting mobile devices for personal and business applications is the myriad variety of phone platforms and their development environments. And add to this the fact that mobile devices are highly personal devices, making the choice of a mobile killer app highly personal too. J2ME’s promise of providing a uniform environment across device is mostly utilised by games and simple personal applications like currency convertors and games. The short lived nature of mobile platforms and user interests discourage developers to put in major efforts in building useful applications. A higher level abstraction or a framework of reusable components to easily put together mobile applications would encourage development of more useful applications. With the crux of business and personal application being a database to store information, The lyteMobile platform provides reusable database components to put together a lightweight database driven mobile application.The ease of building such applications will make it easier for developers to build applications that counter the short lived nature with use and throw style application development. Something that is not expensive in terms of effort or money, which is nothing but a long drawn explanation of Rapid Application Development principles applied to mobile application development. Only with such ease will users be able to build their own version of the mobile killer app, the one they find indispensible.
RADlet, Your Own Mobile Killer App
The most popular method of building mobile business applications is to use the mobile device as a lightweight web client to a remote server. This comes with the limitation of having access to the network at all times and further limits the applications to be designed as a deployable web service. This client server approach makes it difficult to build personal or business applications with ease. The LyteRAD framework changes the perspective of thinking and pushes a lightweight view of database and its associated components to the mobile device itself, called a RADlet. Imagine building a complete employee information system and then pushing a view of the application to a mobile device. This opens up the opportunity of building an app that you find is critical to have around. In other words your own mobile killer app.
RADlets and LyteMobile
LyteRAD is a desktop RAD tool for building lightweight database applications. The LyteRAD component palette has mobility components that can be put together into a RADlet for mobile devices. The RADlet will contain a static view of any associated data and a synchronizing component to update information on both sides. The RADlet can be launched from LyteMobile the runtime framework for launching RADlets on a mobile device.
The LyteMobile midlet provides the runtime components and functions for RADlets. The midlet in turn uses J2ME APIs to provide database functionality, and access to phone features like SMS and GPRS. The runtime will be reused across RADlets making the actual application very small and lightweight.
