Tag Archive for: mobile development

Configuring MobileTogether Server to Work With Your Network


Configuring MobileTogether Server to work properly on your network will require some changes to be made. MobileTogether Server is designed to sit within your network’s DMZ and enabling it to accept connections from clients both inside and outside your network will require your network administrator to open a collection of ports.

This video tutorial will walk you through the ports required to make MobileTogether function. It provides you with a baseline setup that will work inside most corporate networks. Please note, however, that every network is different and some configuration changes may be required. To support this, every port MobileTogether Server uses can be customized; all the ports listed in this tutorial are default and can be changed.

The image below outlines the network ports required by Altova LicenseServer to properly validate files.

Clients will need to be able to connect both internally and externally. We recommend using the default MobileTogether ports, and remapping them to 80 and 443 at each of your firewalls. This is discussed in greater detail in the video.


Finally, a set of ports will need to be opened for administrator purposes. These ports should be limited to your internal network only.

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How Low-Code Can Solve the Developer Shortage


The shortage of software developers in recent years is hardly news – and it’s not getting any better. A recent study arrived at a stunning revelation: software developers are now more valuable to companies than money.

Let’s take a look at some of the factors contributing to the problem – as well as how the emergence of low code tools is helping to solve it in a few surprising ways.

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Configuring MobileTogether Server & LicenseServer


Part of the Altova MobileTogether framework, MobileTogetherServer is the back-end hub that powers your native apps for Android, iOS, Windows, and the web.  The server provides high performance data processing, comprehensive caching, instant deployment of apps, and more.

Every developer looking to install MobileTogether Server will also need to obtain a copy of Altova LicenseServer. LicenseServer is a free product that simplifies license management for all Altova products, including MobileTogether Server. Licenses are managed via an easy-to-use web-based administrator console.

The video tutorial below will walk developers through the steps needed to install both MobileTogether Server and LicenseServer. It covers obtaining and running the installer followed by a basic configuration that will have you deploying enterprise apps in under an hour. This video is the first part in a short series that will eventually discuss SSL Certificate deployment, network configuration, and deploying apps to each of the app stores.

If you’re new to MobileTogether and would like to learn more about developing mobile apps, please head over to the MobileTogether Demos page where we have a collection of video tutorials.

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Implementing Basic Filtering in Your App


There are numerous ways to implement searching and filtering within mobile apps.  MobileTogether Designer allows developers to perform filtering on either your mobile app or on the server via a SQL query.  Knowledge of each of these methods, along with the use cases for them, is an essential tool every mobile developer should possess.

This video tutorial continues to build out the books database project that has been constructed in previous tutorials.  It will cover the steps needed to implement basic filtering in your mobile app.  Additionally, it also introduces developers to the usage of user defined XQuery functions which provide a method to centralize application logic.

 

 

If you’re new to MobileTogether Designer, please take a moment to view the MobileTogether Demos page where we have provided links to additional video tutorials and demo apps.

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Images, Icons, and Tool Buttons in Mobile Apps


We have written previously about Integrating APIs and Mobile Apps to create a rich and entertaining user experience. Since publishing our previous post, we continued to enhance the GPS demo app with additional API support to get current weather conditions and scheduled events nearby.

One challenge with offering all this functionality on a small mobile screen is to provide users with a clear, consistent, and easy to use navigation scheme across all views in the app.

Applying icon images as tool buttons in mobile apps can create a stylish and graceful navigation menu, especially if the icons are chosen based on recognizable and commonly-agreed conventions. For instance, an arrow pointing left often indicates go back, and a floppy disk icon frequently represents save data, even when the ultimate destination might not be a new file nor a disk.

In this post we will describe how to use image icons to build cross-platform navigation menus with tool buttons in mobile apps using MobileTogether.

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Integrating APIs and Mobile Apps


Busy mobile users on the go prefer apps that are convenient and efficient. MobileTogether provides developers with features to seamlessly integrate APIs and mobile apps to combine mobile device functionality with up-to-date information from external sources. This empowers developers to create custom cross-platform native apps that provide a rich and entertaining end-user experience.

Public APIs are a great source of external data to enhance almost any custom mobile app. Developers can combine information from multiple APIs to provide users with better information, faster, in an elegant, integrated package.

APIs are available for almost any kind of information your mobile app may need, from flight tracking to commodity or stock prices to tropical storm tracking.

In this post we’ll look at a GPS app that starts with mobile device geolocation functionality to answer the basic question, “Where am I?” then interfaces with APIs from Google and MapQuest to add a wealth of additional information. We’ll integrate a spatially-aware search engine to locate nearby points of interest as near as a quarter mile radius, all the way to pin-pointing the user’s location in a satellite photograph with a wide-angle view of an entire continent or more.

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Early Software Testing Validates Design


“Test early and often,” is a strategy from agile software engineering that has evolved to become a mandate for software developers in every field. Early software testing is especially important for developers working on cross-platform apps, who must support mobile devices with varying physical characteristics and operating system functionalities.

MobileTogether includes features to incorporate early software testing into the development process without time-consuming compile, deploy, and debug cycles for each mobile platform. The Altova Web site describes the MobileTogether Simulator early software testing feature, and we have blogged about the ability to record and re-run specific sets of actions in test cases.

This post describes Trial Run on Client. It’s built into the MobileTogether Designer to let developers instantly examine app designs and validate logic and functionality across any supported mobile device or platform – Android, iOS, and Windows Desktop or Windows Phone.

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