Top 3 New Mobility Enhancements

In the Spring Release of Progress® Rollbase®, a prime goal was to implement new mobile capabilities in the product. With its focus on developer productivity, Rollbase has had a “one click” option to mobilize an application. This capability enabled Rollbase applications to render the screen to match the form factor of the mobile browser, but the ability to customize and build high-fidelity mobile apps was limited. But all this changed in the Spring Release!

Retaining the model-driven approach integral to Rollbase, developers can now leverage the cloud-based Mobile App Builder to develop and deploy customized mobile apps as HTML5 web apps, hybrid apps to submit to the App Store or source code for custom development. The Mobile App Builder provides a canvas for the visual development of mobile business apps. By dragging-and-dropping Mobile Controls from the palette and customizing their appearance and behavior, users can rapidly develop and prototype mobile apps in a single, comprehensive, browser-based environment.

Connections to backend services in Rollbase are generated automatically by the system to enable developers to visually wire up data from the server in the mobile UI to services running in Rollbase.  Incremental testing is both visual and powerful with simulation facilities built into the browser-based development environment. Finally, Rollbase mobile automatically builds your apps for both Android and iOS as well as an HTML5 version that can be hosted wherever you choose. The cloud-based build farm relieves developers of many of the chores and complexities of building hybrid/native apps for publication to the appropriate App Store; in particular, you don’t need a farm of Macs to build an iOS binary!

In the Spring Release we also provided support for push notifications. Simple push notifications can be administered from an integrated console. Additionally, push notifications can also be generated from Rollbase triggers, such as on state changes to Rollbase objects or as a result of custom business logic.

We've done these three things to get you started:

1. We put together a short series of TechTip videos to explore the Mobile App Builder and create and deploy a mobile app for a simple use cases centered around Opportunity Management.
2. We’ve also mobilized the base CRM application that ships with the Rollbase product and deployed it as a hybrid app.
3. Finally, we’ve enhanced the CRM mobile app with push notification capabilities to illustrate the power of asynchronous, push notifications for mobile business apps.

We’re very excited about these new and enhanced capabilities in Rollbase Mobile. We’re busy working on further enhancements to Rollbase Mobile for our Summer Release – so be sure to stay tuned!