In November of 2014 IBM announced the rebranding of IBM Worklight – IBM’s mobile application development platform – into IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation. IBM released v6.3 in December of that year and the new offering included improved HTML5 support better integration with iOS 8 support for enterprise apps on Windows devices more security and stronger options for continuous delivery.

In March of 2015 IBM released version v7.0 of the MobileFirst Platform Foundation and they detailed enhancements in this latest offering in a webcast on the Global WebSphere Community. Ken Nelson IBM MobileFirst Technical Sales Specialist started out by describing the four key use cases that got the MobileFirst Platform Foundation to what it is today:

• Continuously improve: “One of the great things about developing a mobile application is that it’s an iterative approach” Nelson said “You can take a small subset of one of your use cases roll it out very quickly and then begin to iterate through enhancing that particular product through customer feedback and user feedback.” The MobileFirst platform provides the ability to interpret that feedback into data about how your customers might want to see the app improved.
• Secure: Security was a key focus in the latest MobileFirst offering. Several of IBM’s key security intellectual properties were incorporated into MobileFirst to make sure application development and the data the app relies on are secure.
• Contextualize and personalize: IBM has added new products into MobileFirst that allow the app to focus on the individual user and address their needs.
• Data rich: “We want to make sure the apps you are producing are not just taking legacy systems and then mobilizing them but allowing you to inject new processes and new features by combining different sets of data that are out there and then presenting that on a mobile device” Nelson said. IBM has also incorporated capabilities for offline access for your mobile app in case connectivity is an issue.

IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.0

Nelson stressed that the biggest takeaway from the available features is that developers can still use their preferred app development tools with MobileFirst. “We don’t limit how you’re going to develop your app from a tooling perspective. You can use whatever tooling you want.”

Developers have several MobileFirst module options to help them flexibly build an app. The IBM MobileFirst Platform Studio helps develop hybrid apps; it’s a lightweight editor that supports multiple JavaScript frameworks. Alternately the Command Line interface allows for native app development; users can get started testing out functionality with only a few lines of code.

Additional features of the MobileFirst Platform Studio hybrid development environment are outlined in the figure below.


 

Analytics and Console UI

The MobileFirst Quality Assurance tool allows developers to collect testing and user data. During beta testing testers can submit thorough feedback including bug reporting feature improvement and device information including OS and connectivity insights. The tool also provides sentiment analysis allowing the development team to access data from the Apple app store or Google Play to see how users are rating their apps and keywords that may identify issues or themes that need to be addressed.

Nelson noted that the MobileFirst analytics has been a key area of focus and improvement for IBM in the latest release. The platform now provides an overview of app usage including the total number of sessions and how many sessions are on mobile devices vs. the web.  IBM has also provided functionality to create custom analytics reports as well as export the data into other tools for further analysis.

Specifically new to MobileFirst Platform Foundation v7.0 are security-related analytics. Nelson provided an example of the analytics identifying a number of authentication failures. To an administrator this could mean that they need to rework the app login functionality or it could mean their app is the victim of a malicious attack.

Nelson noted that IBM has greatly improved the operations console to have a sleeker user interface; it’s also compatible with tablets and screen readers.

Security and Adapters

IBM also focused heavily on features to secure mobile apps as detailed in the figure below.


 
Nelson elaborated a bit on the extended application authenticity feature noting that the Operations Console shows exactly what level of security is on the app. IBM has started taking more steps to authenticate an app and validate it when it has changed.  This functionality is available for Android iOS and a subset of Windows Phones.

IBM has added support for Node.js – one of the most requested features from their customers. “What’s great about this” Nelson says “is that we can go ahead and overlay our security framework if you’re using Node.js as well so not just on our adapter calls but through Node.js calls.”

On the topic of adapters MobileFirst now supports Java adapters in addition to their already supported adapters for RESTful SOAP SAP NetWeaver Gateway Sequel JMX etc. Additionally IBM has added support for the SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) as well as increased support for SOAP and RESTful adapters. “You can actually go down now and interrogate a call and only bring back the columns or the attributes that you want to have brought back. It supports the full CRUD capability” notes Nelson. “We put our security framework on top of that so you make sure that the information that’s going from the device to the mobile application server to your back-end system is secure all the way through.

Personalization and Data

MobileFirst has supported iBeacons – used for determining a device’s location – since v6.3. The latest version will include Presence Insights which will provide analytics with the iBeacon functionality. Further details on personalization functionality are available below.


 
The new Cloudant acquisition allows for the geospatial querying detailed above and also for improvements to databases. The NoSQL database provides users the ability to “build out your applications test them against the cloud and see how it works” says Nelson. MobileFirst also allows for offline sync to keep app performance if a user doesn’t have internet access.

Scalability

Nelson provided an example of how their client RunKeeper (detailed further in the Use Cases Provide Tangible Results section of this article) scales their system. The service is offered both in the cloud and on premises.



 
 

Use Cases Provide Tangible Results

Nelson covered three use cases as to demonstrate real-world uses of MobileFirst functionality.

• Tangerine Bank: Tangerine’s goal was to have a 5-star rated app. To do this they leveraged the MobileFirst Quality Assurance offering to allow users to propose new app features; those suggestions are sent directly to the app developers and stakeholders. Using other MobileFirst functionality Tangerine was able to reduce their development cycles from six weeks to two weeks to incorporate the customer feedback more quickly. Tangerine’s app received the Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Midsize Retail Banks from JD Power.
• China Ministry of Railways: The Ministry of Railway’s app allowed any train user across the country to buy train tickets. Their concern was the security of the app; they wanted to prevent hackers from creating malware-laden fake versions of the app that unsuspecting users might download assuming it was the official China Ministry of Railways app. Being the most populous country in the world the Ministry of Railways also had a concern with scalability; at their peak the train system supports 267 million passengers per hour. 
• RunKeeper: RunKeeper is a fitness app that tracks outdoor activities with GPS. They were concerned with the scalability of their app for their 30 million users. Originally built on a relational database the app hit a scalability limit and management costs skyrocketed.  Using Cloudant (MobileFirst’s recently acquired data module) they were able to reduce maintenance costs and improve governance and security. Cloudant is now included as a part of the MobileFirst Platform Foundation 7.0 offering as a single node license.

The full webcast replay is available in our video library; you can also download the webcast slides from our presentation library.