We announced Alpha Anywhere 3.0 this week. The reaction has been swift and very positive. New features released with Alpha Anywhere 3.0 make building mobile apps that work in an offline environment easier. Built-in support for offline data caching and synchronization make creating an app that works in a disconnected environment easier than ever. Providing offline access is a must-have feature for enterprise-quality mobile applications.
We were also excited to see the announcement featured prominently on the www.aonetwork.com website because of the role they play in the IT industry.
Alpha Software launches robust offline mobile solution
Published Wed, October 1, 2014
The challenges of offline mobile support, in which devices connect in-and-out of transient networks without compromising data, are often the most complex (and expensive) solutions for developers to implement in mobile applications. Yet these solutions deliver very robust business value and unparalleled user experience, and have become the most important features in modern-day mobile applications.
"THE OFFLINE MOBILE CHALLENGE"
Outlined in a very recent Forrester Research publication, offline support comes in three different categories:
Client-side read-only cache of static content, which occurs when app users simply need to read content while disconnected, binds the UI to a local data model and uses the networks to dynamically update the UI for the user.
Lightweight "last write wins" CRUD synchronization, which allows users to create, read, update, and delete content when conflict resolution policies are nonexistent.
And lastly, complete transactional synchronization with conflict resolution, which allows robust offline functionality that maintains the transactional integrity on the back-end data store. This permits full mobile functionality, along with "fine-grained control" of back-end conflict resolution.
In addition to the three flavors of offline mobile solutions outlined above, further considerations must also be addressed for a comprehensive model. These include: incremental synchronization of large data sets to ensure full execution; securitization of all data, regardless of connected state; and finally, the UI for conflict resolution cannot detract from the overall user experience, (i.e. in a highly dynamic data environment, a barrage of questions about what data should be stored can overwhelm, and often upset, the user).
FORRESTER'S CHALLENGES HAVE BEEN SOLVED
Alpha Software, which was selected as one of AlwayOn's "Global 100 Companies to Watch", has developed the industry's first mobile application deployment environment with robust offline support built-in, solving the challenges addressed by the recent Forrester report. The new software, Alpha Anywhere 3.0, allows offline-capable transactional business apps to be built, without adding any cost or time. The leading independent research firm recognizes Alpha Anywhere as a low-code application platform, "which supports a very robust solution for HTML5 implementation."
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