LANSA Takes a Whack at Mobile Devices with aXes

October 19, 2010 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that want to develop mobile interfaces to their RPG or COBOL applications were given another option by LANSA last week with the launch of aXes Mobile. As an extension of its established aXes screen modernization tool, the new tool provides a quick route for creating IBM i client interfaces for the hottest handheld devices of the day, including iPhone, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry smartphones, and the surprise corporate hit of the year, the iPad.

aXes is an on-the-fly screen modernization tool that’s designed to be fast and uncomplicated to use. No changes to RPG, COBOL, or DDS source code are required, as the product works by directly capturing 5250 screen data, then transforming it into XML and HTML, which is compressed and sent to a Web browser from an HTTP server that’s built into the product. Similarly, no client components are required to be installed on the client device. All told, these features make aXes a good tactical tool for IBM i Web rejuvenation; it’s not intended to serve as a strategic tool for a long term re-write.

The product was most recently updated in July with version 1.35, which introduced the concept of aXes eXtentions and gave customers more options for customizing their new Web interfaces running across IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari Web browsers. Version 1.35 also added support for the popular JQuery JavaScript library, which makes it easier for developers to add Web 2.0-type screen components, such as drop down boxes, images, and checkboxes, to their Web-enabled IBM i screens.

While aXes version 1.35 could deliver IBM i applications to the Web browsers of mobile devices, aXes Mobile takes its support of mobile devices to a whole new level. To that end, LANSA developed a brand new set of capabilities specifically to handle mobile devices, says Greg Best, vice president of business development at LANSA.

Adapting the GUI screens to the different display sizes of mobile devices is one of the improvements LANSA made with this product. “A developer is able to handle scaling because of new support being added to aXes for all the special <meta> tags and JavaScript options that may be used to better control mobile devices,” Best writes in an e-mail. “We also invested in ensuring that commercial application users would not have to spend a lot of time ‘pinching and flicking’ to be able to read what is on the screen.”

LANSA tried hard to ensure that aXes applications will run equally well on all mobile devices–including the iPhone, Android phones, Blackberrys, and even Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7–as well as the different Web browsers that users will run, including IE, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. Adopting HTML5 and WebKit technologies with aXes is instrumental in that effort, Best says.

“Our view is that the last few years of advances in HTML5, JavaScript, JSON, etc. now make it viable to develop commercial Web browser applications that will run on all phones, including WP7,” Best writes. “Instead of developing multiple applications in multiple programming languages and then deploying and installing them on multiple devices, high quality commercial applications can now be written once and run on many different mobile devices with zero deployment, no middleware, no handlers, or any other server requirements–you just need your iSeries and aXes.”

Much of today’s mobile computing focus is on smart phones like the iPhone and Android, which are extremely popular in the consumer market, and becoming more so in the corporate market. But the bigger mobile game-changer may reside in tablet-sized devices like the Apple iPad, which are generating a lot of buzz in the corporate environment. It may seem odd, but distributors are deploying $500 iPads in warehouses.

LANSA wants to ride that computing wave with aXes Mobile. “The tablet market is about to explode with competitors to the iPad, like RIM’s Playbook, and aXes will allow the typical COBOL or RPG developer to deliver IBM i applications to these new devices,” Best writes.

LANSA also wrote new tutorials to help developers get up to speed with aXes Mobile. The tutorials are self-paced, and specifically focused on techniques and design approaches for mobile applications, Best says. “The tutorials are in a format that uses RPG, 5250 DDS, and are easily understandable by RPG and COBOL programmers,” he writes.

aXes Mobile is available now as a component of the aXes suite. For more information and downloads, see www.axeslive.com.