Reviews
Briefing: QAnywhere
QAnywhere
included with SQL Anywhere Studio
iAnywhere Solutions
Waterloo, Ontario
(519) 883-6898
www.ianywhere.com
There was a time when all we had on PocketPC and Palm devices were
rudimentary form designers and databases, and we liked it. (We also
walked uphill to school through the snow, both ways, but that's another
story). In the last few years, though, an increasing amount of
enterprise software has been ported or connected to these mobile
platforms. Now iAnywhere has taken another big step with the release of
QAnywhere.
QAnywhere, quite simply, brings message queueing to the little boxes.
It's compatible with any messaging system that supports the Java Message
Service (JMS) - which is most of them, because you can find vendors to
glue just about any messaging system to any other. This means you can
get reliable, ordered delivery of messages to and from applications
running on the mobile platform, regardless of connectivity issues.
When you're sending messages from the device, QAnywhere keeps working
even when the device is disconnected. It implements a mini-queue layer
that keeps running even when the application is turned off, so messages
are delivered when the device reconnects to the network. At this time
incoming messages will be picked up too. You can fine-tune this behavior
by implementing transmission rules to prioritize some classes of
messages over others.
Other features of QAnywhere include encryption, a public API, and push
notification of messages that are waiting to be delivered. The whole is
integrated into iAnywhere's SQL Anywhere Studio 9.0.1. As always,
iAnywhere's licensing works on the principal of giving you the tools for
free and working out a charge if you distribute the software.