Mobile development is more than just coding and Impact 2014 session speaker Beery Holstein (IBM) focused not only on features of IBM Worklight 6.2 but on building a mobile strategy as well.

Earlier in the week at Impact Ed Brill noted that 73% of companies that have set up a mobile strategy have realized ROI on their investments but less than half of companies actually have a mobile strategy.  This really emphasizes the importance of not jumping into mobile development to keep up with your competitors but to make calculated methodical decisions to create the best app you can.

Beery started the session by reviewing the pros and cons of the various methods of mobile app development. Simply scaling your website to a mobile device is the easiest cheapest and fastest method to get into mobile but your performance and user experience will be poor.  A native shell enclosing an external m. site will provide a better user experience than a mobile website and you can use native UIs but you’re still not hitting the optimal user experience. 

You can attain the best possible user experience by using pure native but it requires a unique development effort for each device OS. This can be time-consuming and costly to maintain.  Most customers realize that their whole application doesn’t need to be written in native so they opt for a hybrid of mostly native with some HTML 5 screens. These are just some of the considerations companies must weigh when choosing a development method for their mobile app.

Beery noted that when developing a mobile app only 30% of the value and effort is visible in the mobile user interface. 70% of the value lies under the surface in user engagement operations and security. Considerations that fall into this latter category include:

• Offline ability: If your app user gets on an elevator or goes on the subway can they still use your app? It would be optimal user experience for them to have continuous availability. This would require the app to store the information locally and sync with the app when the connection is restored.
• Push notifications: Push notifications are different for each operating system. Engaging with your users with push notifications will cost more money.
• Malware detection: How do you detect malware? What do you do when you find malware?

After this look at mobile strategy Beery detailed the new structure of the IBM Worklight platform. IBM Worklight originally covered development runtime the operations console and the private store. This  has recently been rebranded as IBM Worklight Foundation.  The entire IBM Worklight platform in addition to IBM Worklight Foundation also covers Application Scanning to detect code vulnerabilities during development and Quality Assurance to collect beta test feedback and analyze user sentiment.

The new features in this session specifically refer to the IBM Worklight Foundation of the platform and include:

• Flexible app development
  • New command line tooling
  • More native APIs
  • Mixing native and HTML5
  • Wizards for back-end  integrations
  • Worklight Application Framework
  • IBM’s cloud services on Bluemix
  • The ability to extend your user reach
    • Native app start-up and transitions
    • Enhanced push notification
    • Campaign manage with Xtify
    • USSD support
    • C# API for Windows 8 Phone
    • SSO via iSAM
    • Comprehensive mobile operations
      • Enhanced operational analytics
      • REST APIs and CLI for management task automation
      • Role-based access with Java EE security
      • Remote-controlled mobile device log collection
      • Cluster and active-active arch
      • Cloud-hosted SoftLayer
      • Security
        • Maas 360 integration
        • Trusteer integration. Trusteer provides a way to detect malware on a device; specifically it specializes in banking malware. Trusteer can also tell if the device is jailbroken or rooted. The Trusteer SDK will send its analysis over to the Worklight runtime. The security in Worklight will then decide what actions shouldn’t be allowed (e.g. if Trusteer determines that a phone has been jailbroken Worklight can prevent money transfers on the phone for a banking app.)
        • JSONStore for native iOS and Android apps. The JSONStore is a lightweight database included in Worklight. The JSONStore has two benefits. The first is offline capabilities that allow users to continue using the app when a connection is lost. A local copy is saved and synched with the app when the connection is restored. This provides an excellent user experience. Secondly information stored in the JSONStore is encrypted and safe.
        • JSONStore for Hybrid Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Beery noted that while the Windows Phone may not be widely popular in the US to make sure you research where your app users live because devices vary in popularity from country to country. For example Windows Phone 8 is very popular in India and Italy.
        • Direct update for Windows Phone 8
        • Enhance app authenticity for iOS and Android. This functionality verifies that your app is genuine and hasn’t been modified.

Worklight has two options for push notifications: basic push and Xtify. How do you know which push notification to use? Beery explained that if you want to send notifications on certain happenings for your app send a basic Worklight push. If you want to send a notification based on certain users’ behaviors (i.e. send a user a coupon based on their purchase history) use Xtify.

The session concluded with two demos: one of a Worklight hybrid app for iOS and Android and a second demo diving into analytics in IBM Worklight that allow admins to find the cause of performance issues and filter stats by OS and device so you can track down issues for specific device users.

IBM Worklight 6.2 will be available May/June of 2014.