Introduction to Building Mobile Business Objects
Overview
The drive to connect people, process and devices is a never ending cycle of development. Enterprises are demanding applications that deliver seamless communication with their partners and customers without sacrificing security, transactions, reliability and performance. Distributed application systems are quickly becoming the norm. Service orientation is an approach to software design and development that helps to solve this problem.
Service oriented (SO) design defines message oriented programs called services that are the fundamental solution building blocks. Service oriented architecture results in loosely coupled application systems that enable business to respond faster to change. SOA allows for a more natural depiction of the business process, real life events and system boundaries in software, improving the ability to respond to changes in the business. Also, the closer modeling of application systems to reality allows for relevant and actionable business data and loose coupling between services that reduce the ripple effect of changes.
The ever increasing complexity of enterprise systems has tested the limits of the OO architecture and design and paved the way for the evolution of SOA. Service orientation is a compliment to object orientation not a replacement. The primary distinction between SO and OO is in how you view applications. In a solely object oriented approach, an application is a tightly coupled program built from class libraries that have dependencies on each other. An SO based application is a different entity entirely, composed of loosely coupled autonomous services programs. SOA defines the message oriented services to build distributed solutions, created with object orientation.
It’s the combination of OO and Service oriented that are important to understand when building not only mobile applications but any type of .NET application. In this article we will look at how these types of objects are built and the ways they can be used within mobile applications using Visual Studio 2005.