Enterprise J2ME Developing Mobile Java Applications [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Foreword

The U.S. Department of Commerce published a report "Education and Training for the Information Technology Workface" in August 2003. It points out that innovations that can drastically improve productivity will continue to be developed by U.S. companies and that the developer community must be prepared to leverage these innovations. The key question is to identify the technologies that manifest these innovations and focus on those that drive revenue.

Enterprise mobility has been identified as a very promising answer technology as it enables extensions to existing IT solutions. These extensions include support for alternate form factor devices like PDAs and Smart Phones, as well as extended operational characteristics such as sporadically connected operations over low bandwidth network with potentially high latency and sparse geographic coverage.

Many of today's solutions for financial traders, sales agents, factory floor engineers, warehouse managers, and health care professionals still rely on pen-and pencil-based solutions when they are out there in the field because they either don't have network coverage, cannot use a PC-based form factor, or both. The overall business efficiency is often limited by these "in the field" bottlenecks. As more companies look into mobility extensions to improve efficiency, which directly affects the bottom line, developers who lead this field of IT-based solution extensions for mobility will have ample job opportunities in the global economy.

The best enterprise mobility strategy is not to re-invent the wheel. Rather, it should take advantage of existing infrastructure, standards, and developer skills to extend a consistent architecture that incorporates everything from powerful backend servers to laptop computers to PDAs and to the smallest smart phones.

The author of this book, Michael Yuan, has worked extensively with engineers from IBM and many other enterprise mobility solution providers. This book is a very comprehensive technical guide to today's enterprise mobility landscape. It covers architectural design patterns, best practices, and real-world innovations. Important mobile paradigms and architectures such as smart clients, end-to-end managed services, synchronized data access, and content-based security are discussed in detail. What I like the most about this book is that it not only covers the pros and cons of certain architectures but also walks you through concrete solutions using sample applications.

A consistent architectural solution is most valuable when it is based on open standards. This enables solution integrators to make technology selections from multiple providers with minimal impact on integration cost. This book is a comprehensive guide to many of these real-world innovations from multiple providers. The unbiased and technical discussions not only allow readers to make informed choices but also illustrate real-world design approaches.

Enterprise mobility is one of the most promising and cutting-edge fields in the IT industry. If you are an experienced developer looking to modernize your skill set and move up the value chain, I highly recommend this book.

Jim Colson

IBM Distinguished Engineer

Chief Architect, IBM Pervasive Computing Division

Austin, Texas

August, 2003