This week it was back to school again.
Introduction to IBM Mobile Foundation was the thing to learn and it was kinda fun. What I did not know, you can ask IBM to alter the course schedule, just because you claim to be important. Somebody asked to do all the presentation stuff on one day and the labs the next day. This is pure hell. Sitting through 7 hours of presentation isn’t something you want to happen to your worst enemy (no, the rumors are not true, I did not fall asleep, but it was close). I don’t know who made our life a misery, but if it is the one I suspect, he wasn’t there half the time anyway, because he had such important phone calls all the time (don’t forget, if you die while serving your company, they just shove your dead carcass out of the building and somebody else takes your chair before it is cold. YOU ARE BY FAR NOT AS IMPORTANT AS YOU MIGHT THINK).
Back to mobile foundations. Do you know something about all that app stuff and how to use that around your company? No? Have a look at IBM Worklight, IBM Cast Iron and IBM Endpoint manager – together called „Mobile Foundation“.
Use it to develop mobile apps, manage devices and integration. As for me, I finally get the grips with mobile technology, which goes far beyond developing an app and throwing it to the app store. Especially since you want to minimize the cost of developing and managing a lot of different devices. IBM Worklight lets you develop an app once for several devices, with a few tweaks here and there, and helps you deploy and control updates. It’s based on Eclipse and you go through the usual hell, until you find all the bits and pieces. But for all of you out there doing Java Script, here is the tool you might want to look at to get into mobile development. Java and Objective-C are still a requirement, if you want to use some features of the devices, but Cordoba can at least help you there.
Cast Iron just connects everything to everything (their words, not mine). It isn’t a full featured ESB, but for apps with the lower workload, it is a nice and fast solution. Not that the Lab I did made a lot of sense to me, but it looks like that thing is selling like hot cake. Certainly because with Cast Iron it often takes just days connecting data sources, instead of month and even years in a ESB system.
The last part in the puzzle is Tivoli Endpoint Manager, which allows you to nicely manage all the aspects I can think of and probably a few more.
Again, those were two very interesting days. Looks like, IBM somehow found out, that training people for free could make sense and sometimes products are so special (or complicated), I need hands-on time to grasp the sense behind it.