BCD Lets the Mobile Flow with WebSmart 10.1

February 18, 2014 Alex Woodie

When developing mobile applications, the attentive developer must take into account the size of the mobile device’s screen to ensure a good experience for her users. With the latest release of its WebSmart development environment, BCD Software (now a part of Quadrant Software) added new capabilities designed to maximize the limited available real estate on mobile screens.

BCD unveiled WebSmart version 10.1 just prior to being acquired by Quadrant in early February. The big new feature in the interim release is a new mobile reflow table template that improves the functionality of Web applications that present data in sortable columns.

Specifically, the new template, which is based on the jQuery Mobile reflow table widget, allows a developer to maximize screen usage by using pop-up windows for the filter and sort options. If the user is accessing the application from a tablet, the widget will use a side-by-side columnar layout. Or, if the user is accessing it from a smartphone, it will stack the columns.

A new jQuery Mobile widget in WebSmart 10.1 helps ensure that users have displays that fill the screens of tablet and smartphone.

BCD’s new template was created by a WebSmart PHP user, Robert Binetti, a developer with Central Semiconductor. BCD encourages users to contribute widgets they develop back to the company so they can benefit other users.

There are several other new features in WebSmart version 10.1, including the capability to right-click on function names as a shortcut to a user function definition; a new ILE function, fetchseg, that lets users retrieve segment data into a variable; and the capability for new PHP functions tabs to update immediately when include/require statements are changed.

BCD sells PHP and ILE versions of its WebSmart development environment. Both versions execute natively on IBM i, while the PHP version also supports other platforms. For more information, see www.bcdsoftware.com.