Enterprise Android Apps

In a recent SD Times article entitled “Rise of the Androids” by Alex Handy, Android was portrayed as a rising contender to iPhone and Blackberry. I would agree that Android is in fact rising rapidly given the growth in numbers of developers joining various mobile platform developer groups. This growth is quite interesting to track on a daily basis almost.

Crackberry.com, home to several mobile development groups reported (at least yesterday when I checked) that AndroidCentral membership has grown by more than 20,000 in less than one month to 201,248 members. Blackberry’s membership was 2.8 million members and iOS membership was 62,075 (numbers change daily). I’d say it might be conceivable for Android to overcome iOS this year, but based on the sheer number of developers developing Blackberry applications I think it will take longer for Android to overcome Blackberry.

As an executive for Midnight Coders, an integration company, I’m seeing lots of interest in mobile applications from our Enterprise customers. These are customers that have built rich internet applications in Flex, Flash and Silverlight for example and are now looking for ways to extend their .NET, Java and PHP services to mobile devices. But, the challenge of course is dealing with a whole new set of APIs and integration issues, such as:

• how to configure mobile applications to invoke backend services,
• how to load data from the server-side into mobile applications,
• how to exchange messages between different client types,
• how to push messages from the server to the client;
• how to connect mobile applications with services running in the Cloud.

Mark Piller, CEO of Midnight Coders and creator of WebORB, recently demonstrated at a Denver RIA Developers Group event how to connect an Android app with a MySQL database running in Google AppEngine in order to do data management from Android.

While Mark demonstrated running a Flex remoting application in AIR on Android that leveraged AMF remoting, WebORB also enables remoting for native Android.  Enterprises that have adopted a rich internet application strategy nine times out of ten utilize remoting as a means for high speed data transmission across the wire, which is much faster than can be done via web services. This is great news for Enterprises that want to work with technologies they are already familiar with.

If you’d like to see how this is done, please join us for another webinar on Building Android Applications Using WebORB. This webinar is on March 10th at 11am (central). Register Here

Live Cycle DS Customers Shocked at Price Increase

Just read on Anil Channappa’s blog http://anilchannappa.org/2009/11/20/lcds-3-0-released/ that LiveCycleDS 3.0 is now about 50% more expensive.  They used to charge $20,000/cpu and now they charge $30,000/cpu.  That’s an interesting strategy in times where most enterprises are looking for ways to conserve expenditures during recessionary times.  I think the strategy is to drive most customers to a hosted model, which will come out sooner or later. It’s a strategy we are well advanced in too.   For LCDS customers who are in shock, no worries…we’d like to welcome you to our WebORB family.  We offer a competitive alternative, but at a much more palatable price-point.  Check out WebORB for Java http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/weborb-for-java/overview.html. You’ll find a very feature rich and stable offering for a fraction of the price.   Contact me directly at kathleen@themidnightcoders.com to learn more.

EMC chooses WebORB for Java

Great News! After thorough research, EMC Resource Management Software Group has chosen WebORB for Java as a foundational platform for building other software appliances. We’ll be filming a video case study soon to showcase the benefits EMC Resource Management Software Group is experiencing using WebORB. So stay tuned…

Happy New Year…Let’s Get Started!

I love the start to every new year as it is a chance to do something new. We’re kind of skidding into this new year with our hair on fire because we’ve been working so hard making new products. While we’ve been quietly releasing some of them in 2008, I get to start marketing them in 2009. Let me back track a little bit and tell you what we did in November and where we are taking that vision.

Last November we bifurcated the free WebORB product into two editions: Community and Enterprise Edition. The previous free WebORB became the Community Edition and we’ve introduced a new Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition product includes basic WebORB features found in the previous free WebORB product and basic getting started documentation. We are building new advanced features like clustering, AMF caching, disconnected mode support and conflict resolution into the Enterprise Edition product and selling this product as a subscription service that includes not only the Enterprise Edition license, but also full documentation and various support services.

To further our product roadmap and vision for being The RIA Company, we are developing products that support end-to-end development, test, deployment and runtime operation of Rich Internet applications. Our product vision (lineup) includes:

• WebORB Server (in multiple flavors)
• WebORB SDKs
• WebORB PDF Generator (.NET evaluation edition is now available for download)
• RIA AppPuncher (includes debugger, regression, stress and load testing editions)
• RIA Analytics

This is an exciting year for us as we have many launches coming soon, including the launch of our partner program. With WebORB users all over the world speaking many different languages, we would really like to see our product localized in many different languages, but we need partners to do that. The first ones to the table win. 😉

Let’s make this year great for each other and our customers.

How RIAs Curb Costs in an Economic Downturn

On the heels of my last post, I do believe one of the reasons why RIAs are recession-proof is because the solutions enable a reduction in cost with added benefit in optimizing web-related business. Of course my response is again somewhat colored by what my company provides specifically in terms of application intelligence (yes that does equate to how your web visitors negotiate your website), but even more where do you need to optimize for maximum throughput. In the end though, it does boil down to User Experience and Developer Productivity; our tools enable reduction in overall development cost, increased development velocity, reduction in time to market and increased profits. To dicuss these benefits further, please call +1.888.MYWEBORB option 1.

New WebORB for Java now supports Silverlight!

Mark Piller states….WebORB for Java 3.0 is released

I am very happy to announce that WebORB for Java version 3.0 is released into production. It took us very long time, but I am sure the wait was worth it. The product has gone through extensive testing and the final release is full of cool features. Below is a summary of the most notable ones:

• Product installer. WebORB now comes with the installer. When you download the product, you get weborb4java.jar. You can run the product by using the following command: java-jar weborb4java.jar
• Silverlight integration. Silverlight client is not an equal citizen among other rich client technologies WebORB supports. In fact, WebORB is the only product to my knowledge that provides the level of integration between Silverlight apps and Java POJOs, Spring Beans, and EJBs. The product includes a Silverlight client library you can import into Visual Studio projects which will enable remoting between SL and Java. Additionally, the product includes Visual Studio templates to make it easier to get started with Silverlight, Java and WebORB
• Real-time Messaging integration. The installer provides an option to add real-time messaging support. When installed, the featureset includes support for data push, client synchronization for data management, remote shared objects, pub/sub support without polling as well as streaming video.
• Significant Data Management improvements. There are major improvements in stability and code generation performance. The system has been tested on a variety of database types as well as data types.
• ActiveMQ integration. In general, WebORB integrates with any JMS implementation to provide publish/subscribe messaging. Specifically with ActiveMQ, the product makes it easy to get started as it includes all the special configuration options as well as ActiveMQ messaging broker itself.

In the upcoming weeks and months we plan to roll out several major products. WebORB for Java is a key element of our product strategy. We also plan to publish comparisons between WebORB for Java and other alternatives to make it easier for you to see how much more superior our technology is.

New Products and Pricing Coming November 1st

Hi All:

This post is to give our community advance notice of some changes we are making at Midnight Coders. As of November 1^st, we will restructure our current offering and introduce some new products and services with new pricing. We believe this will help us better meet the needs of our customers, while continuing to develop and offer great Rich Internet Application products and services.

Customers that bought under the current plan will have certain renewal rights and should discuss these rights with me. Certainly, there will be lots of questions around whether or not we will continue to offer free licenses and what the new offering will mean to current and future customers. The answer is “yes”, we will continue to offer free licenses and we will be releasing more information as we finalize the new offering and pricing. Click http://www.themidnightcoders.com/licensing/newlicensingfaq.htm to read our FAQ on these changes.

Mark Piller to visit Denver RIA Developers’ Group

Denver RIA Developers’ Group Meeting

When	5:30pm – 8pm Tuesday, June 3 2008
Where	900 Auraria Parkway, Denver, CO (Tivoli Building – Room TBD) Map

Mark Piller
Founder Midnight Coders, Creator of WebORB, will be sharing with the Denver RIA Developers’ Group on how to use WebORB, the free client-service integration platform, for RIAs.

Agenda:

5:30 – 5:59 Networking

6:00 – 7:29 Main Topic and Discussion

7:30 – 8:00 Open Discussions

We’ve Changed Our Business Model

We’ve been listening to our customers and watching general market trends and as a result, we have changed our business model. In the past we have derived our revenue and sustained continuous development through the sales of WebORB licenses, support, training and professional services.

For many, the price tag on software licenses was enough to cause customers to delay development or search for open source alternatives. We’ve adjusted by making our WebORB licenses completely FREE. This means developers can download the full-featured unrestricted version of each WebORB edition from our website without needing a license key or activation code. We believe this will make it very easy for developers to standardize on WebORB for all their RIA projects no matter the size of the organization.

Additionally, developers who consider and try open source integration tools tend to want some level of support for them and/or for their customers. Open source solutions tend to rely on the community for that, whereas commercial solutions have dedicated support staff and support plans. Midnight Coders is a commercial company located in Frisco, Texas. We provide generally closed but FREE (WebORB for PHP and Ruby are open source) integration software and a suite of four commercial support plans to choose from.

We also provide Quick Start Training and Professional Services/Team Augmentation and are actively developing the final releases of each product edition, as well as, a product for Silverlight and a business intelligence solution. Contact me directly if you’d like to know more.

Who’s on the Market of Fast Communication Protocols for Flex?

I’m posting a link to an excellent article by Yakov Fain, editor-in-chief of Flex Developer’s Journal (http://flex.sys-con.com) and managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest book, “Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters” in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. Yakov teaches Java and Flex 2 part time at New York University. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor.

Jakov has interviewed Mark Piller for this article, http://wireless.sys-con.com/read/474885.htm which is about Flex integration solutions. Essentially, Mark describes why WebORB for Java is a solid alternative to Adobe’s Live Cycle Data Services, and why WebORB for Java surpasses what is offered in Adobe’s new BlazeDS product. WebORB for Java also provides a rich alternative to any open source solution. We believe WebORB will become the Flex, Flash and AJAX integration solution of choice for Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails and .NET developers due to the richness of the offering and the flexible design of being able to support multiple clients in multiple backend environments. Developers who are building applications for multiple server environments can go to one source, write once and deploy to many.