Darwino makes OpenNTF mobile!

[Latest News] The iOS app works perfectly, but we are struggling with the great fruity company to get it accepted to the store, because they claim there is not enough mobile content on OpenNTF... We'll do our best with the OpenNTF team to get more content leveraging mobile capabilities.

Darwino 2.0 features a mobile micro application architecture well integrated with the IBM Domino server. It can render any existing Domino web application (classic & XPages) on a mobile device while taking care of the painful details:

• Real mobile applications available from both Google Play and Apple Store
• Authentication management, to avoid prompting the user when the server requires credentials
• Opening external pages in a separate browser window to provide the best user experience
• Mobile notifications, to alert users when something new arrived and let him/her act appropriately
• Plus many implementation details, like error management and recovery

To quickly experiment with the capability, we are providing a generic mobile client that one can use to connect to any Darwino enabled Domino server. This client is available on both application stores and is fully configurable to point to any server. As a default configuration, we make it point to OpenNTF!

As most of you know, the main OpenNTF applications, like Collaboration Today, are XPages based with a responsive design. This make them very easy to integrate with the micro application architecture. Moreover, Darwino extends Domino Designer with a new design element to detect database changes and send mobile notifications. With that in place on the OpenNTF servers, we are able to send new notifications when a new entry is available in Collaboration Today. By the way, these notifications use the mobile first IBM Cloud service (a.k.a. Bluemix).

The implementation on the OpenNTF server was straight forward:

• Get the Darwino OSGi runtime installed
• Set some configuration properties
• Create a new design element for mobile notifications. To leave the existing databases untouched, we did that in brand new, separate database

Voila, in less than an hour it can be all setup. The same can happen to your own applications!

What are the next steps then? Well, a few things:

• We need to work with the OpenNTF team to mobile enable other parts of the site. Ideally, the whole site should be mobile enabled!
• Why not white labeling the generic client with a pure OpenNTF branding (icon, title, ...)? Darwino offers this options.
• Move forward and create Darwino single page applications, using web or mobile native technologies, to get the data offline and provide the best user experience without connectivity!

Stay tuned, OpenNTF becomes mobile!