Rational Software Architect is one of IBM Rational's most popular downloads because of the productivity gains you get in your projects. This presentation covers what's NEW in RSA, but also covers some popular uses of RSA and how RSA and Mobile application development intersect.
As we state in the “Good Design is Good Business” site on developerWorks, design can come in many different forms! Here’s let’s look at how Design and Mobile intersect – and discover how we might approach various design aspects for mobile smartphone app development.
[PRESENTER: this chart is an intro to the capabilities and packaging of IMDLS, emphasizes the incremental incentive and reinforces the cross-sells from the prior slide]. So why do YOU care about Rational’s Mobile bundle? Simply put, Delivering better mobile apps sooner drive more cross-brand value. Because IMDLS (don’t use acronym – SAY IT ALL OUT) INCLUDES Worklight Server for Dev/Test purposes, this SEEDS the PRODUCTION environment for Worklight adoption. Worklight is another key part of the IBM Mobile Foundation, which also includes CastIron and the IBM Endpoint Manager, so driving IMDLS, drives a bigger cross-brand deal for you and DEEPER value for the client.
As we state in the “Good Design is Good Business” site on developerWorks, design can come in many different forms! Here’s let’s look at how Design and Mobile intersect – and discover how we might approach various design aspects for mobile smartphone app development.
MAIN POINT: There is a lot of compelling data in the marketplace, but we have identified five key trends or observations – supported by market data and by customer successes – that we believe have strong implications for the future of mobile. SPEAKER NOTES: [1] Mobile is the universal sensor. It is with most of us 100% of the time and is the primary means we use to interact with our employers, our customers, our family and our friends. [2] As they interact they are creating vast streams of data that, with the right analytics, can teach us things about their behavior and their preferences that we could not learn in any other way. [3] These interactions inherently become transactions. Whether shopping, purchasing, searching for or providing information, collaborating or seeking service, mobile enabled people and objects are seeking not simply to connect, but to complete tasks when, where and how they wish. [4] Thus, the mobile experience must transcend any single device to accommodate multiple screens and touchpoints. [5] Finally, as we think about mobile, we can’t confine our thinking to devices like phones and tablets. The ability to tag things, sense things, power things and shrink things has extended mobility beyond people to nearly every other type of object on the planet. As we have said since the start of smarter planet things are becoming more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent than ever before, and mobile is right at the center of that story and will fundamentally change the way the world works. I just highlighted five key mobile trends that drive IBM’s strategy of the mobile enterprise market. Each trend brings with it an opportunity that I want to highlight here. Trend Opportunity 1. Mobile is primary Transform the value chain 2. Insights from mobile data provide new opportunities Deliver contextually relevant experience 3. Mobile is about transacting Drive revenue and productivity 4. Mobile must create a continuous brand experience Deepen engagement 5. Mobile enables the Internet of Things Leverage industry transformations Let’s begin with the first key trend, that mobile is about transacting and all of the notions that make up a “transaction” . Let ’ s flesh that out a bit further, because with each trend comes opportunities that your enterprise should leverage. With mobile transactions, the opportunity is to drive new and additional revenue and productivity through mobile. This requires businesses to re-imagine every interaction in a Mobile First world. Moving to the second trend you highlighted around mobile insights – this brings with it an opportunity to deliver a contextually relevant experience to your employees, partners and customers. This enables you to harness deep insights to inform new mobile innovations. Thirdly, mobile is primary. We all know that already. So what does it mean to you and your business? Simply put, you deliver mobile apps that transform the value chain because you recognize the importance of prioritizing ‘mobile first’ since it is the way of the future. Moving along, let’s focus on this requirement that a user’s experience must be consistent across all channels. We must prioritize and leverage user imperatives to benefit the enterprise, meaning you can deepen relationships with consistent brand experience by integrating your front-end presence regardless of hardware or operating system it is presented on with your back-end, regardless if its locally or remotely hosted infrastructure. The ‘how’ doesn’t matter anymore – people expect it to work seamlessly. Lastly, let’s move beyond phones. Because ‘mobile’ really isn’t just about a phone, or a tablet. By broadening our scope of what we consider ‘mobile’ we capitalize on other opportunities for your business. Machine-to-machine is HUGE. Thus, why not leverage industry transformations driven by M2M through cloud technologies and whatever comes along next in order to capitalize on this 18 billion opportunity expected by the end of 2022.
MAIN POINT: We have made strong progress in Mobile since the completion of our purchase of Worklight, just a year ago. SPEAKER NOTES: Throughout 2012 IBM has made significant progress in Mobile through a variety of acquisitions, investment and organic growth. We started 2012 with the acquisition of Worklight which filled a key gap in our capability set and enables our clients to deliver rich mobile applications on a multitude of platforms. In first half 2012 we released a new packaged offering to the market in IBM Mobile Foundation, bundling Worklight, Cast Iron and Endpoint Manager, as well as acquired Emptoris Rivermine which helps us manage telecom expenses. In second half 2012 we completed the acquisition of Tealeaf CX which provides important capabilities to drive analytics for mobile. In 2012, we also launched several mobile service offerings along with several updated software offerings including IBM Mobile Connect and IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. In first half of 2013 we pulled together our comprehensive set of software and services capabilities and brought our IBM capability story to the market with the rebranding of our portfolio to IBM MobileFirst, with the message that IBM has a broad set of capabilities to help clients rapidly turn every interaction into an opportunity to drive return on engagement and investment. More recently, we acquired Urban Code to strengthen our dev ops capabilities.
There are a number of mobile app development approaches / styles that can be utilized to develop apps. You may find yourself using more than 1 style across your portfolio of internal and external apps. Web – user simply accesses your existing web sites from their mobile browser. UI is not mobile-optimized. Mobile web – apps accessed from a mobile browser (like a regular web app), but UIs have been mobile optimized (probably using a JavaScript framework like Dojo, jQuery Mobile, or Sencha Touch). Typically the URLs for these apps start with “m.” – for example “m.cnn.com”. Hybrid – installed and run like a native app, but the core of the app is written in HTML, JS, and CSS, enabling it to run across all major device platforms. This style supports writing native-specific extensions (in the native language), but if this logic is needed across all supported platforms, it will need to be written in multiple languages. Native– building the rich interfaces to mobile applications – embracing the ecosystems of the native vendors… The choices become daunting to consumers (both in understanding skills, resources required, best practices etc..) Richness of the UI increases as you move towards Native. Portability increases as you move away from Native Maintenance increase as you move towards Native, as you are typically needing to maintain separate code bases, tools, and infrastructures. Capabilities available in the various styles: Web and mobile web - almost all modern smartphone/tablet browsers support Geolocation (so, getting the user's location) and ability to store information needed by the app/site locally (but no access is provided to the phone's file storage area) Hybrid - same capabilities as web/mobile web, plus the following (primarily provided via PhoneGap): Accelerometer (captures device motion) - useful for apps where the way the phone is held/moved is important Camera - take a picture or access photos previously taken with the phone Ca pture - Provides access to the audio, image, and video capture capabilities of the device. Compass - detects the direction or heading that the device is pointed Contacts - create new contacts and access contacts stored on the phone File access - read/write files on the device storage Media - play and record audio files Network / connection info - provides info about the device's network connectivity (wifi, 3G, etc) Notifications - visual, audible, and tactile device notifications (alerts, sounds, vibrations) Native - everything above, plus access to all APIs and capabilities provided via native SDKs (primarily you'd go with Native if you wanted to use native UI widgets and controls vs. web widgets) File Name Here.ppt
MAIN POINT: We have made strong progress in Mobile since the completion of our purchase of Worklight, just a year ago. SPEAKER NOTES: Throughout 2012 IBM has made significant progress in Mobile through a variety of acquisitions, investment and organic growth. We started 2012 with the acquisition of Worklight which filled a key gap in our capability set and enables our clients to deliver rich mobile applications on a multitude of platforms. In first half 2012 we released a new packaged offering to the market in IBM Mobile Foundation, bundling Worklight, Cast Iron and Endpoint Manager, as well as acquired Emptoris Rivermine which helps us manage telecom expenses. In second half 2012 we completed the acquisition of Tealeaf CX which provides important capabilities to drive analytics for mobile. In 2012, we also launched several mobile service offerings along with several updated software offerings including IBM Mobile Connect and IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution. In first half of 2013 we pulled together our comprehensive set of software and services capabilities and brought our IBM capability story to the market with the rebranding of our portfolio to IBM MobileFirst, with the message that IBM has a broad set of capabilities to help clients rapidly turn every interaction into an opportunity to drive return on engagement and investment. More recently, we acquired Urban Code to strengthen our dev ops capabilities.
MAIN POINT: IBM launched a new IBM Mobile offering portfolio SPEAKER NOTES: Today IBM we are re-launching our mobile offering portfolio to provide customers with an end to end set of offerings to help them embrace mobile first. We will approach the marketplace with a series of solutions led by GBS that are industry oriented. We have agreement with GBS on the three most important usecases in each industry, which we will discuss in greater detail on the next chart. GBS will lead the dialogue around the transformation and we will the offer a range of HW and SW mobile enabled solutions to support the transformation. Today on the app store there are over 200 IBM Software packages that have mobile enabled clients. We also have mobile enabled services that you can get from the smart cloud. Across the bottom of the chart, you will see how we will broaden the concept around the IBM MobileFirst Platform. When we launch the new brand it will include the mobile application development platform. Today that is known as Worklight. We will have mobile analytics which is known as Tealeaf today. We have mobile security – which is managed today by app scan, ISAM and other products in the security portfolio. And we have mobile management – which today is mobile endpoint manager. These products will integrate to provide a seamless suit of capabilities. In addition, on the left, bottom and right hand side you see a set of strategy & design services, cloud & managed services, and development &integration services. Our colleagues in GTS and GBS have a set of services around mobile management, mobile application development and lifecycle management among others. And all of this will run on the cloud operating environment which enables customer to consume the solutions either on premise or in the cloud.
MAIN POINT: User Experience Design ALSO comes in many forms, visual examples, visual workflows, and textual. Regardless of the approach, you still need a way to COLLABORATE among the stakeholders (users, developers, business owners etc) to ensure you are meeting the needs from each view point. Customers do expect higher quality of user experience with mobile apps, and this can be delivered in several ways as shown here: More direct involvement from users/stakeholders in design – build mockups using graphic arts tools and use Requirements Composer to capture those and issue those for comment among the stakeholders. Stop putting in information in disconnected sources! Put mockups and stakeholder comments into the project so everyone can save time! Provide visual representation of flow and interactions so that you have a solid understanding of how your user and your systems interact instead of guessing and re-working your code. Capture textual user stories in Rational Team Concert. Eliminate laborious spreadsheets, documents and emailing them around to your team with built-in: design, test, and measure. Link the user stories back to requirements. Link code or other project items to your user stories. Recording potential interaction flows or use cases using Requirements Composer – get a industry standard visual language like BPMN or UML. Directly build your UI in a WYSIWIG fashion.
Once you use the Rich Page Editor in Worklight you can “Simulate” this using the built-in Mobile Browser Simulator and see how your app works in a variety of platforms and orientations.
This is much more expertise on developerWorks and in IBM INfoCenters!
IBM has a practice in its Digital Marketing agency that does User Experience design! And has won awards!
This is a reference for the IBM Interactive team’s work with Rational software. This customer example is a team of teams: THREE DIFFERENT teams working on different native mobile platform apps and one web app team. When they need to coordinate changes – they need to do this as a TRANSACTION – working all together to deliver the change across platforms. Rational Team Concert helped this customer improve productivity in delivering these updates.
MAIN POINT: Quality and time are two factors in the “software paradox” and many organizations face these same challenges. Source: SD Times: “More than half of organizations are building mobile applications” http://www.sdtimes.com/link/36553
Test Design is important to the verification of quality of your mobile apps. Someone has to make a decision to release or not. Largely today, testing of mobile apps is still manual – but you need more productivity than what email/spreadsheets and documents can provide. Enter Rational Quality Manager!
MAIN POINT: Most mobile testing today appears to be laborious manual testing. Automated testing can provide significant productivity gains for agile, mobile projects. SPEAKER NOTES: Clients can greatly reduce testing time for mobile apps through automation. With a typical “record and playback” type of approach, Rational Test Workbench is a NEW offering by IBM that not only aligns with the IBM MobileFirst initiative, but also extends Rational Test Workbench capabilities beyond the “Green Hat” capabilities of test virtualization and performance testing, described in the next section.
MAIN POINT: Most mobile apps are engaging “systems of record” or existing systems to provide enterprise knowledge, data and business processes and therefore, mobile testing should represent testing more than just the User Interface. SPEAKER NOTES: Rational Test Workbench also includes capabilities to test the back-end enterprise systems. This provides two distinct benefits: Reduces MIPS / processing usage on enterprise systems, which can often involve chargebacks to the client teams using those MIPS. This can be instant operational savings for many projects that need to test. Keeps mobile appdev teams agile so that they can continue to develop and test iteratively in the aggressive backlog schedules.
MAIN POINT: While this Mobile User Interface testing is a NEW offering, the productivity gains of automated testing have been known by IBM for a while. SPEAKER NOTES: Here’s an example of one of many clients’ experiences using IBM Rational’s Test Automation tools. There’s a link to the public case study.
Design Manager is a great way to share enterprise designs with mobile app dev teams through a simple web interface! If there are no designs existing, Rational Software Architect can be used to “reverse engineer” existing systems and produce UML diagrams to share to the mobile app dev team.
RSA Design Manager is easily searchable for design elements and helps developers better analyze designs for impact based on relationships that exist in the design – all through a simple web interface.
Many projects just use whiteboards and then throw away the design. However, sometimes you need to capture your thoughts and designs to share this to the team. RSA Design Manager provides a light-weight sketching capability to quickly capture thoughts and link them to other parts of your project.
RSA also provides a way to generate Worklight mobile adapter code – streamlines a developers experience from specification to code through generation.
uDeploy has some activity diagram design components that help build the deployment automation!
Provide higher level of abstraction to communicate and as a team arrive at the best and simplest solution possible, only adding additional design aspects when required in an iterative fashion Early analysis and validation, some of that might be through patterns, best practices, and automation and other aspects is through collaboration with SMEs, experienced team members, domain specific experts Once you have those blueprints of the system they enable informed & iterative change going forward, additions as needed, understand change and being able to respond quickly … agility
RSA has very deep capabilities and we’ve been working on broader capabilities to address the phases of development…
Saves time and eliminate mistakes from manually recreating a new element and copying all data and changing connections.
For imported elements: Imported element shown instead of element import Element import properties still available through context menu Improves sort, navigation and import context
Get Feedback on 8.5 here
Get Feedback on 8.5 here
This new feature provides support for the import of XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) 1.0 documents as BPMN documents. It provides the UI, framework and transformation rules for XPDL elements. This includes the creation of a single BPMN Process model for the input XPDL model with Processes, Item Definitions, Tasks, Call activities, Gateways, Start and End Events, Resources, and Sequence Flows. Lanes described in vendor specific elements in XPDL model will be imported but other vendor specific elements will be ignored during import. You can add additional import transformation rules for vendor specific XPDL elements by using Eclipse extension points.
This enhancement provides you with a new Worklight transformation called "UML-to-Worklight for SOAP services". With v9.0, you can generate Worklight HTTP adapters for accessing SOAP-based services from Web services or SOA models. You can have a service model and use that model to generate the HTTP adapters for accessing the SOAP services by using this new transformation capability. You can deploy the generated adapters on a Worklight server. You can also use the transformation capability to optionally generate the client application code for invoking the SOAP services by using the generated SOAP adapters. IBM WebSphere Cast Iron enables companies to integrate applications, regardless of whether the applications are located on-premise or in public or private clouds. The product now provides transformation support for generating cast iron adapter procedures from the REST model representing the initiation point of Cast Iron orchestration. It also supports generation of client stubs for mobile application that lets mobile application connect to the adapter procedures.
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