News

Sybase's iAnywhere adds tool for mobile developers

• By John K. Waters
• August 5, 2004

For mobile application developers who have been struggling with integrating their apps with back-end enterprise messaging systems, Sybase-owned iAnywhere Solutions this week unveiled a new application-to-application messaging technology within its SQL Anywhere Studio product.

'Our customers were telling us that in addition to synchronizing data to back-end systems, they needed to be able to build mobile apps that could interact with these enterprise messaging systems,' iAnywhere Senior Product Manager Roger Kehl told eADT. '[QAnywhere] really leverages the mobile architecture we already have in place with our mobile database and synchronization technologies.'

The Dublin, Calif.-based company's new QAnywhere technology is a store-and-forward messaging solution that extends functionality in SQL Anywhere's MobiLink synchronization server that allows it to function as a messaging server. It is designed to enable application developers to enhance the functionality of their apps by reliably sending and receiving messages between mobile applications and enterprise systems.

'The kinds of applications our customers are building -- particularly in industries like field service or deliver and logistics -- involve putting mobile apps on laptops, tablets or PocketPC devices,' said Kehl. 'And they often need to exchange data with both back-end databases and messaging-based systems. In both cases, the application needs to be able to work whether online or offline, and deal with unreliable wireless network coverage and dropped connections.'

The QAnywhere messaging technology is designed to extend and complement SQL Anywhere's ability to integrate with enterprise systems via data synchronization, XML or Web services. 'With QAnywhere, developers who have been using SQL Anywhere Studio for data synchronization can now easily extend their application infrastructure to accommodate messaging, reducing administration requirements and simplifying deployment,' said Chris Kleisath, iAnywhere's senior director of engineering.

QAnywhere features include: 

• A comprehensive messaging API to provide a programming model for building mobile messaging applications. 
• Transmission rules for optimizing the performance, cost and bandwidth of message delivery. 
• Support for transactions and message compression. 
• Message encryption during storage and transmission. 
• Push notification of messages waiting to be delivered. 
• Connectors to back-end, JMS-based enterprise systems.

iAnywhere is making its new QAnywhere technology available immediately in SQL Anywhere Studio 9.0.1. Developers can visit http://www.ianywhere.com/qanywhere to download the free SQL Anywhere Developer Edition.