May 15th, 2013
“So how can enterprise app deployment and mobility be sped up?”
This is the burning question posed by James Bourne in an article released yesterday regarding Enterprise app deployment being a struggle for businesses, in the online news journal, appstechnews.com.
It’s an interesting question, and one I’ll circle back to after providing some thoughts to you.
The Backstory
Yesterday, Micro Focus, a software company with branches in the UK and USA, published a press release which included findings from a recent study conducted over mobile app development at the enterprise level.
From the study, 2 major findings arose regarding why companies are struggling with creating, releasing, and maintaining mobile applications. They are:
1. Corporate mainframes are not setup to handle creation and implementation of mobile applications
2. The War of the Operating Systems produces uncertainty with what technology companies should base mobile applications on
The PR goes on to include some additional details on the motivation behind companies shift to a mobile market, which highlighted reactions you would naturally expect a business to follow given the laws of supply and demand.
The Statistics
* Nearly 80 percent of the 590 CIOs & IT directors polled stated mobile dev teams were a blend of in-house and outsourced teams
* In 3 yrs time, 1 in 3 businesses expect a need for 60 percent of their applications to be available for mobile devices
* Over 75 percent are currently facing issues with existing systems not playing nice with mobile or allowing them to go mobile
Breaking The Skills Gap
Mr. Bourne’s article calls out a skills gap in today’s developers and a delay in the ability to push out the high demand of mobile applications by teams. While the ever-growing demand for applications to be moved mobile increases, I can’t help but suggest that perhaps there is not so much a “skills gap” as a gap in the technology being used by today’s companies.
From the article, it seems that most companies (as polled) are using separate technologies and thus separate teams to write mobile applications. Why not use the teams you already have and empower them to use the coding languages they already know, to move enterprises mobile? Why not use a technology that allows you to design a single code-base that can be deployed across desktop and mobile devices? Using such a technology would help combat both the deployment and skills gap. A single code base that creates cross-platform design would instantly increase the number of apps that can be designed – putting you closer to the goal of having 60 perfect of enterprise apps mobile by 2016.
It would stand to reason that instead of utilizing separate tools and systems to do multiple project types, that a single system capable of producing both desktop and mobile applications would be easier managed and most certainly a more economical approach. A singular product capable of moving legacy applications and new applications into a mobile perspective, would divest the need for creating separate teams, and could help companies keep development in-house.
Think Smarter, Not Harder.
MyEclipse Secure 2013 was developed on this premise. You can prevent skills and deployment gaps by covering supposed shortcomings with stellar technology. In a mobile-driven climate such as today, your teams must be able to move you towards the goal of mobility with all haste. MyEclipse Secure 2013 provides this opportunity to businesses. Simply put, we provide a way for your existing teams to rapidly design cross-platform applications for this mobile world.
Be the hero that pushes your company closer to mobility goals. Check out MyEclipse Secure 2013 and see how this innovative solution allows your teams to design quickly across multiple platforms.
Tags: Android, android nexus, app store, apple, Application Development, Genuitec, google, google android, HTML5, iOS, ipad, ipod, Java, MobiOne, MyEclipse, PhoneGap
Posted in Bright Ideas, General, Genuitec, MobiOne, MyEclipse, Opinion, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
May 14th, 2013
Mobilization of legacy applications (MoLA) involves rethinking the app’s user roles and use-cases in mobile contexts. Mobile users are typically more spontaneous and goal oriented in their use of mobile business applications than users of the legacy application. Thus, the mobile app’s requirements should concentrate on identifying and prioritizing the app services that a user on the go will most likely use. The starting point for Mobile PetStore is to optimize features and services for the “guest shopper” role. The JEE6 Petstore application provides the “guest shopper” the ability to browse the store’s inventory of animals and to purchase animals online.
 Scope and Functional Requirements
A pragmatic strategy for the mobile application life-cycle is an incremental product release process with a feedback loop that incorporates usage data to drive the priority and urgency of future app features, i.e., a data-driven, iterative process. The most important “guest shopper” feature of Mobile PetStore is the ability to browse the store’s animal inventory. Using the incremental release strategy, the app’s initial feature will be pet catalog browsing. After the initial app release, we will collect app download and usage data to determine the features to provide in future releases such as shopping cart, social media integration, etc.
Title: Browsing the Store Animal Inventory
User Role: Guest Shopper
Story: A user is able to browse the store’s animal inventory. The animal inventory is a hierarchy represented by a catalog that contains animals categorized by their type, e.g., fish, bird, dog. Each animal type or species of animal is a product in the catalog, e.g., gold fish, parakeet, poodle. The animal entity that a store stocks and sells is known as an item and is a specific type of product, e.g., male goldfish or female black poodle.
The guest shopper accesses the shop’s animal catalog from his smartphone or tablet and drills down through the hierarchy of categories, products and items to find the information he is seeking. The user interface should make maximum use of the available display space.
 - Conceptual Model
Key Design Constraints – The Bottom Line
A primary challenge when mobilizing a legacy application is the technical constraints you must work with as you build mobile app features. In many cases, the organization’s goal is to develop a mobile app with low development costs by simply “bolting-on” a mobile app to the existing legacy app’s services and data with no changes to the legacy app. In cases where the legacy application does not support the mobile app’s use-cases, then only limited extension of the legacy app is allowed. The last thing management wants is to retest and recertify a legacy enterprise application modified to support the roll out of a small set of mobilized features with an unproven ROI. I will take these same constraints into account as I build Mobile PetStore.
Design
A design process I like to take is to create a preliminary design assuming I have no legacy system constraints. Then, systematically revise the design by rolling in constraints, beginning with those having the largest impact.
REST Web Service API Definition and UI Design
It is not uncommon to have limited useful technical documentation when working with a legacy system. Many times, the docs were not updated to reflect the state of the system as it evolved from release to release. In this case, I have almost no documentation on JEE6 Pet Store other than the source code. Rather than rummaging through the code, I decided to deploy it, run the app and learn about it from the outside inward. I will share access to the Petstore project in the next article.
In the following screenshot, I have imported the JEE6 Pet Store project into MyEclipse, deployed it to my local Glassfish server, and used the MyEclipse REST Web Services Explorer to view the app’s API and interactively test it. The REST Web Services Explorer enables you to interactively view and invoke the web service API of any JAX-RS web service. This made it a super simple process to develop familiarity with the web service API.
 MyEclipse REST Web Service Explorer running JEE6 Pet Store My REST Web Service Explorer experiments led to this very simple preliminary conceptual model for the mobile app.
 Mobile Pet Store Model User Interface Design
The data hierarchy is the simple tree, Catalog>Categories>Products>Items. A mobile user interface design pattern for interacting with this type of structure is a linked set of screens, one screen for each datatype. I used Genuitec’s MobiOne product to do a quick layout of the screens in iPhone and iPad formats.
 Mobile PetStore – iPhone UI Mockup
Next Steps
In Part-3, I will dive in and do some programming. I’ll take a look at using jQuery Mobile for a useful UI layout.
Did you miss Part-1? Click here to view the launch of the Mobile PetStore series.
Drawing tools image: www.templay.de
Tags: Android, android nexus, app store, apple, Application Development, Genuitec, google, google android, HTML5, iOS, ipad, iPhone, ipod, MobiOne, PhoneGap, Web Development
Posted in Bright Ideas, Genuitec, How-to's, MobiOne, MyEclipse, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized | No Comments »
May 8th, 2013
Last month CyberCoders, a leading recruiting firm, released their list of the top 10 IT skills for 2013. This list was developed from researching over “10,000 tech companies and their hiring requirements” and then pinpointing common threads throughout.
After reviewing the list (found below), we discovered that MyEclipse 2013 offers developers the ability to utilize 6 of the 10 skills listed! Score! We’ve added a star (*) to each of the offerings that MyEclipse 2013 provides tooling and capabilities for.
CyberCoders’s Top 10 Skills in Tech for 2013
1. Mobile Development (iOS, Android)*
2. Cloud Computing (AWS, Azure)
3. Front End Development*
4. UX/UI Design*
5. Big Data (Hadoop, MongoBD, NoSQL)
6. C#
7. Ruby on Rails
8. Java*
9. PHP*
10. Linux*
We’re excited to see that so many of the development tools provided on CyberCoder’s list of top paying skills are already featured in MyEclipse, proving once again, why MyEclipse is the superior IDE tooling choice for developers.
Genuitec is happy to see the focus move to more mobile driven and cloud driven technologies, especially given our addition of Mobile Tools in the MyEclipse 2013 workbench and our overall strategy for this year!
We love being able to give our developers access to the latest trends and technologies!
If you’re using a tool that’s not giving you access to these top skills, download a free 30-day trial of MyEclipse 2013 and start positioning yourself as a lead technology developer! Our software will empower you today, with the skills you need for the future.
Tags: Android, android nexus, apple, Application Development, Eclipse, Eclipse Foundation, Genuitec, google android, HTML5, iOS, Java, MobiOne, MyEclipse, open source management, Secure Delivery Center, Web Development
Posted in Bright Ideas, General, Genuitec, Java, MobiOne, MyEclipse, SDC, Secure Delivery Center | No Comments »
May 7th, 2013
Today, Adobe broke the news that it will discontinue and replace their traditional software version of Creative Suite with the cloud-based version released last year, Creative Cloud. According to Adobe, Creative Cloud has quickly become the preferred version with its customers, allowing them a sense of flexibility with a monthly subscription model. For Adobe, this new model has revealed telling information regarding their customer’s buying preferences – when given the option, the ability to purchase on an “as needed” basis at a lower cost is favorable, the same is true of Genuitec customers.
A decade has gone by since Genuitec launched it’s first version of MyEclipse. Over the course of time, we have expanded our products and services but we’ve held true to our belief that subscription models make the happiest customers. We believe that customer’s should not be forced into paying exorbitant costs for “lifetime” access to software that often change offerings, become obsolete, or stop being relevant for their business needs. Thus, we adopted a yearly subscription model wherein our customer’s have the option to renew each year or explore other avenues.
In addition, they can upgrade or downgrade tiers and increase or decrease seat counts, with no penalty. In turn, what we’ve seen is a great customer-base who thoroughly enjoys the flexibility we offer by this low-cost annual subscription model, not to mention it creates a steady income flow for Genuitec.
At Adobe’s annual Max Conference, Adobe spokesman, Scott Morris said “the move to a subscription system would free the company from its traditional 18 to 24-month upgrade cycle.” Beginning in June, Adobe will only be releasing updates/improvements as they become available.
Wow, that sounds familiar! Right, MyEclipse and SDC users? Why should users be required to wait for updates to fall ONLY on a specific, locked in schedule? That’s absurd! Genuitec releases updates as they are created, ensuring that our customers have the hot fixes and tool updates immediately.
We’re happy to see Adobe make this shift and we’re confident their customer’s will quickly adapt to this model and appreciate the flexibility now provided to them. Cheers, Adobe!
Tags: Adobe, cloud, Creative Cloud, Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Genuitec, MyEclipse, Photoshop
Posted in Bright Ideas, General, Genuitec, MyEclipse, Opinion, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
May 6th, 2013
We are back in the office after spending a hectic week in Las Vegas for IBM’s Impact 2013 conference. We are simply exhausted from the long days on the conference floor, and yet incredibly energized over the new contacts we made during Impact! It is certainly a sight to behold, witnessing thousands of people navigating as best they can through a hundred different exhibits, collecting conference loot, and searching for that magic product to solve their software pain points.
This year’s Impact conference, held at the gorgeous Venetian Hotel, was filled with lots of GREAT conversations with existing customers and what we hope will be some amazing newly forged customers. Genuitec has been attending for over 7 years now, however, this year we went in with a difference approach. Our goal being not just to capture information but really spend more time engaging directly with customers and listening to what headaches they’ve been facing in their development environments.
We are thrilled with how this focus shift was responded to. We were able to dig deep into what MyEclipse Blue Secure brings to the table for our WebSphere customers and chat about specific concerns and the ways MyEclipse Blue can help. We also had the opportunity to share with attendees a quick demo of what the new Mobile Tools in MyEclipse 2013 look like. You can view that same demo on our home page by clicking here.
MyEclipse Blue Secure with new Mobile Tools was received with gusto! Attendees were almost as excited as we are about this Mobile First story which allow customers to bring their legacy applications forward with HTML5, JQuery, and PhoneGap/Cordova API power.
Our Secure Delivery Center garnered some major love from customers, who are facing some dynamic challenges not just with software management, but also with security concerns and delivery woes.
We had a great time this year and as one would imagine, we have a bunch of following up and reaching out to do!
We can’t wait to show you the fully unleashed power of MyEclipse Blue Secure and would love to setup a customized demo with you! If you’d like to see MyEclipse Blue Secure with Mobile Tools first hand, you can download a free 30-day trial here or email us at info@genuitec.com to setup a demo with our team.
Tags: ALM, Android, android nexus, apple, Application Development, Eclipse, Eclipse Foundation, Genuitec, HTML5, IBM, IBM RAD, IBM Rational, IBM WebSphere, iOS, ipad, iPhone, ipod, Java, MobiOne, MyEclipse, MyEclipse Blue, open source management, PhoneGap, RAD, Secure Delivery Center, Software Delivery, software distribution, software management, Web Development, WebSphere
Posted in Eclipse, General, Genuitec, Java, MobiOne, MyEclipse, MyEclipse Blue, SDC, Secure Delivery Center, Thought Leadership | No Comments »
April 28th, 2013
We are all setup at booth E-1 for Impact 2013!
If you’re here in Las Vegas for the conference, please stop by and learn how you can enter to win free MyEclipse Blue for 1 year or an iPad mini!
 
Those of you who are not attending can still win too! Pay attention to our @Genuitec twitter feed to increase your odds of winning!
We will be giving away 2 iPad mini’s and 2 sets of 1 year subscriptions to MyEclipse Blue! One will be explicitly for Impact conference attendees with the winner announced on Wednesday at 12 pm noon CST. The non-conference winner will be announced on May 30th directly here on our blog!
Those of you who schedule a MyEclipse Blue Demo will receive not only a double entry in our drawing, but will also receive a free 20-30 minute demo of MyEclipse Blue in action directly with out team. We’re confident that if you give us 20 minutes of your time, we can show you that not only are we delivering Mobile technology First to your WebSphere environment, but also that we can do it for less money AND without the need for Worklight. Email us at demos@genuitec.com to schedule your demo today!
What you need to know:
Each day we’ll have a daily Impact message, posted at 8 am CST. By re-tweeting our post, your name goes in our drawing fishbowl. Each re-tweet you post is equivalent to 1 entry in our bowl.
You can earn an extra entry by “friending” our Facebook MyEclipse page. (If you’re especially awesome and already our Facebook friend, then post a message on our page that reads, “MyEclipse takes you Mobile First!” and we’ll count that as an entry :) )
For Impact Attendees – the Free MyEclipse Blue license as well as the iPad Mini winner will be announced on Wednesday at noon from the conference floor. If you don’t show up within 30 minutes to claim your prize, we select a new name.
For Online Participants – Retweet our posts to capture entry opportunities! The winner will be announced on this blog at noon on May 30th. Be sure to check back. You’ll have 3 days to claim your prize before we name a new winner.
MyEclipse brings you mobility and agility without hassle or a ridiculously high price tag. Schedule a demo with us today to learn how we can revolutionize how you and your teams develop!
We look forward to setting up your demo and learning more about your development needs.
Tags: conferences, Eclipse, Eclipse Foundation, Genuitec, IBM, IBM RAD, IBM Rational, IBM WebSphere, MyEclipse, MyEclipse Blue, RAD, WebSphere
Posted in Eclipse, General, Genuitec, MyEclipse, MyEclipse Blue, Status, Thought Leadership, Uncategorized | No Comments »
April 25th, 2013
Thanks for your submission – we look forward to seeing you at the IBM Impact event in just a few days. Visit us to learn about MyEclipse Blue edition, where we’ve taken your IBM WebSphere investment and made it mobile with new HTML5 tools, PhoneGap-Cordova APIs, JQuery templates and more. Take those legacy applications get them mobile with MyEclipse Blue Edition – a full featured IDE designed to work with IBM technologies at a fraction of the cost compared to IBM tools.
See you in Vegas!
Tags: IBM Impact, IBM RAD, IBM Rational. Genuitec, IBM WebSphere, MyEclipse Blue, WebSphere
Posted in General, Genuitec, MyEclipse Blue | No Comments »
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