Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

ADVANCED BusinessLink, a Kirkland, Washington, provider of Web and wireless middleware for the OS/400 platform, has announced new software that allows mobile employees to access their wireless applications even if the iSeries Web server it connects to is down, or if they've roamed outside of the cellular network. ABL developed the new application, which is called pocket Strategi, earlier this year for one of its clients, and plans to make it generally available starting in November.

ADVANCED BusinessLink was one of the first middleware vendors in the OS/400 space to bring wireless support to its software, the Strategi platform, in early 2000, when the marketing buzz for wireless was loudest and new standards, such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML), were supposed to turn cellular phones into a do-it-all client interface. WAP, like so many promising new technologies developed over the last several years, never lived up to the hype, and today it is struggling to overcome some serious security limitations.

While WAP never made it out of infancy, the whole idea of wireless--or accessing back-office applications or functions from a mobile device, usually a PDA--is slowly gaining traction in the midrange. Most software vendors espousing wireless support in early 2001 couldn't point to a single implementation using the cellular network, but today reports of wireless implementations seem to be announced every week, even among OS/400 shops, which have never been noted for their aggressive adoption of new technology.

ADVANCED BusinessLink is one of those vendors with a wireless story to tell. Earlier this year, the company helped Southern Wine and Spirits, the country's largest distributor of alcoholic beverages, develop a sales application for handheld and notebook computers running Microsoft Windows CE. One of Southern Wine's main concerns in developing the wireless application, which is served from an AS/400, was having the flexibility on the client side to connect to different types of handheld devices, as well as the power to run the applications on the PDAs even when not connected. Southern Wine used a modified version of ADVANCED BusinessLink's Web application server, called Strategi, to develop browser-based Java applications that run on the mobile computers.

Now ADVANCED BusinessLink is offering a shrink-wrapped version of the application it helped Southern Wine develop, called pocket Strategi. This new offering has several more benefits than traditional server-based wireless offerings, said Scott McBurney, ADVANCED BusinessLink's vice president of business development. These benefits stem from the fact that pocket Strategi is a self-contained application, with its own Web application server and database management system. Having these components running on the handheld means that users can access an application even if the back-end server is inaccessible--if the user is outside the range of the cellular network, the server is down, or any other reason. The screen-to-screen response time is also very fast with pocket Strategi powering the wireless application, the company said.

ADVANCED BusinessLink's main goal in offering pocket Strategi is to eliminate the hassle that customers face in developing the infrastructure required to support a wireless application, McBurney said. "One of the key areas where pocket Strategi fits in is eliminating the complexity of developing true wireless applications and coping with nuances of each of the devices," he said. "For the company, the real benefit is that you're not dealing with the infrastructure; you're writing business logic. You're spending time writing powerful applications."

Companies will be developing their pocket Strategi in Java. After developing their application using ADVANCED BusinessLink's design tools, users will be able to deploy their application to any PDA that supports Java, including Microsoft Windows CE devices, such as Hewlett-Packard's iPaq or Jornada, as well as embedded Linux devices. (Palm OS is a "weird" one, McBurney said, as it does not fully support Java to the extent of the others; although that may soon change.)

Underneath the covers, ADVANCED BusinessLink says, users will find that pocket Strategi incorporates infrastructure basics. The software features the company's High Speed Messaging technology, which, company sources said, simplifies the task of building Web applications by requiring that users code only their business rules. High Speed Messaging servers plug into the application's "micro" Web server, to populate Web page templates with data, whether or not the user is connected to the host server through the cell network. A lightweight database management system provides access to files through JDBC or the MiniDBMS standard, both of which, ADVANCED BusinessLink said, are supported by most handheld platforms.

Pocket Strategi's security features include password protection and bidirectional challenge-response keys using public key cryptography. A built-in file transfer engine and programmable event handlers automatically manage all data transfers between hosts and clients, even transfers involving large amounts of data or large numbers of clients. ADVANCED BusinessLink has optimized all these components to fit inside of the limited storage of a typical handheld; the company recommends 64 MB of memory on the PDA.

Pocket Strategi will require the core Strategi Web application server to be installed on the host (usually an OS/400 server). The cost to deploy pocket Strategi will vary according to the company's needs, McBurney said, and it will usually involve ADVANCED BusinessLink implementation services. For more information, contact the company at www.businesslink.com.