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Mobilizing your company's core business applications requires more than just a wireless connection between a company Web server and users'handheld devices. Somewhere between your back-end database and application servers on one hand, and your handheld devices on the other, you need mobile middleware.

Mobile middleware compensates for device disparities by rendering standard application screens in device-specific ways, interacts with client business logic in the handheld device, ensures security and aids in application deployment. A mobile middleware vendor also can help you mobilize a workforce automation system by offering time-saving guidance and software tools. The tools help you build, deploy, run, troubleshoot and maintain mobile applications. The guidance helps you adopt mobile best practices and avoid the pitfalls that early pioneers encountered.

The ideal mobile middleware product should work with every type of wireless handheld device, run on any server platform in your shop, reliably deploy the application, automatically handle synchronization issues during periods of disconnection, be responsive and intuitive to use, offer the highest level of security and adhere to industry standards. The vendor should guide you through development, deployment and ongoing application management with unerring expertise.

To find the best mobile middleware vendor, we invited several to submit their products to our Alabama lab for testing. We tested Omni Mobile Platform 2nd Edition from Aligo; OneBridge Mobile Solutions Platform 4.7 from Extended Systems; M-Business Anywhere 5.3 Application Edition and SQL Anywhere 9 (including UltraLite, a client-side relational data repository) from iAnywhere Solutions (a subsidiary of Sybase); and Sure Wave Enterprise Server 4.1 from JP Mobile.

We found that Aligo's Omni Mobile Platform has the best environment for building, deploying and managing mobile applications. It supports virtually every type of wireless handheld device. It runs, by virtue of its Java application server architecture, on many platforms. Its visual design environment makes building and reviewing the design of mobile applications a breeze - an important feature for network people. For these reasons, we award Aligo our Blue Ribbon Award.

However, we found that all four products were reliable and capable tools. Depending on your situation, you easily could incorporate any one of them into your company's core business application mobilization strategy

Mobilizing your forces

The easiest path to a productive, successful mobile application begins with tackling simple e-mail and calendaring. Appropriately, each vendor offers handheld client software that can access Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes groupware functions.

Starting with e-mail and calendaring not only familiarizes end users with the operation of the handheld device that you standardize on, but also gives you a head start on the handheld application user personalization that you will want to implement with future applications.

To avoid risks and headaches, we suggest you make liberal use of your chosen vendor's guidance and expertise as you design and deploy an application.

Aligo's Omni Mobile Platform sends device-specific screen data to handhelds; interacts with back-end servers and custom mobile client code; and gives application designers a rich, intuitive visual design environment. However, Omni Mobile Platform's handheld data repository feature isn't as capable as M-Business Anywhere's.

Omni Mobile Platform consists of Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) components and is a comprehensive Enterprise Java Beans application server environment. Imagine an IBM Web-Sphere or BEA Systems' WebLogic environment especially geared to wireless handheld clients. Now add a handheld client visual design development tool. Voila! You have Omni Mobile Platform. Its platform-neutral Java underpinnings made Omni Mobile Platform highly scalable in our tests.

Creating wireless application business logic with Omni Mobile Platform was child's play. Via its .Net-based Data Access Layer integration between Java servers and Microsoft .Net devices, Omni Mobile Platform made the wireless handheld retrieval and display of data from Java Database Connectivity data sources (such as relational databases) almost as quick and easy as that of M-Business Anywhere's relational database option.

The Sync Engine component contains, among other modules, a Sync Cache module. The client and server have complementary Sync Caches for storing data on the handheld client and tracking its database operations. Omni Mobile Platform's Sync Cache module requires a client-side Java Virtual Machine (JVM), such as pJava, MIDP or Personal Profile. In our tests, when we switched a handheld device from disconnected to connected state and back again, the Sync Engine modules transparently let our application continue running. If we wished, we easily could notify the user of the disconnection and ensure no database access attempts occurred until the handheld device reconnected to the network. Except for the Sync Cache JVM requirement, an application developed with and run in the Omni Mobile Platform environment, it works on virtually every available Web-capable mobile device, including Palms, Pocket PCs, wireless phones, Research in Motion pagers, iMode phones and J-phones (Japan). If you have Microsoft Visual Studio, Omni Mobile Platform emits handheld client programs for Microsoft .Net Compact Framework just as well as it does for Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) or other wireless environments.

The M-Business Anywhere server component renders screen data for display on a mobile device and interacts with back-end servers and the mobile client software that your developers create. Sybase also offers a relational database for use in mobile devices. However, Business Anywhere doesn't offer a visual design environment for building client code: We used CodeWarrior to specify how our handhelds should process the information sent to and from the devices.

M-Business Anywhere is a family of three products. The full-featured M-Business Anywhere Application Edition works with transaction-oriented, data-driven applications that need custom-written mobile device clients. The moderately capable M-Business Anywhere Web Edition Pro supports non-transaction-based data collection applications on mobile devices. You would use this edition to distribute read-only Web content to mobile devices. Sybase also offers a version of its SQL Anywhere relational database software, called UltraLite, for storing application data directly on the handheld device. UltraLite comes in handy for example, when you decide it makes sense to store ancillary, read-only application data on the mobile device instead of retrieving the data across the Internet. For our test, we used Application Edition and UltraLite.

On your centrally located servers, M-Business Anywhere runs on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Solaris 2.6 and Red Hat Linux 7.3. Its client component runs on Pocket PC with operating system Version 2000, 2002 or 2003, Palm OS Versions 3.5.2, 3.5.3, 4.X or 5.X and RIM 857 and RIM 957 BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds (although the RIM client supports only M-Business Anywhere Web Edition). IAnywhere Solutions says M-Business Anywhere will support tablet PCs and notebook computers sometime in the first half of this year.

The M-Business Anywhere handheld client operates in offline (disconnected from the Internet) and online (connected) modes. In offline mode, the client retrieves Web pages, forms and database material from an internal cache of saved information, whose size is device-dependent. In online mode, the client accesses information over the Internet and can take part in real-time transactions. If a client momentarily disconnects from the Internet, the M-Business Anywhere client automatically switches to offline mode. Designing the application to detect the mode switch and behave appropriately (continue working based on just the cached information or notify the user and stop working until the handheld reconnects) is easy In our tests, the M-Business Anywhere client seamlessly flipped to and from online and offline modes. Furthermore, the handheld's UltraLite relational database option integrated tightly with M-Business Anywheres offline and online mode changes.

Extended's OneBridge Mobile Solutions Platform translates application screens into device-specific displays, interacts with back-end servers and offers a Windows-based visual design environment for building handheld dialogs. While it offers excellent synchronization services, it doesn't have a handheld device relational database option.