m-Power Tested in NiSUG’s Mobile Challenge

November 27, 2012 Alex Woodie

The folks at mrc‘s U.K. office are talking up the mobile prowess of their m-Power tool after participating recently in an IBM i development challenge sponsored by NiSUG.

NiSUG (National iSeries User Group) held its first annual development challenge, called the “Application Modernisation Shoot Out,” at the COMMON GB event it put on in October 2011. Six vendors participated in that challenge, including mrc, which was very vocal about its success, along with competitor Profound Logic.

When the NiSUG held another IBM i challenge at the 2012 International Power event in London earlier this month, mrc was there again, ready to start coding–or, in mrc’s case, ready to start fine-tuning a pre-configured Java framework to meet the specified requirements.

m-Power stole the show, according to mrc U.K. (which you would kind of expect them to say). The Chicago-based company says that its U.K. developers exceeded the basic requirements of the challenge–to build a simple data retrieval application on top of an IBM i database.

Instead, mrc’s U.K. developers used m-Power to create a more full-featured mobile app that also included an interactive report, a ranking report, an executive dashboard, and a secure shopping cart. What’s more, the mobile app had user-based security, could run on tablets and smartphones from different manufacturers, and was available in English, French, and Chinese.

It sounds as if there were fewer participants in this year’s NiSUG shoot-out. Profound Logic is also touting its entry, and we’ll bring you some coverage of its approach in next week’s issue.