Building mobile applications is a challenge, there are many unique requirements and requests from customers and users towards mobile applications, as well as from the businesses. But from the side, there are also lot of requirements coming from the security aspects. To fulfill these requirements, often the needed skillset is missing.
Another challenge here is to integrate
a mobile solution into the back end to retrieve the data and write it back to
the back end. As mentioned, authentication is one aspect of mobile application
development, but also the single sign-on towards the various back ends that the
mobile solution will touch can be quite challenging. In addition, all these
efforts you put into mobile app development and running afterwards the mobile
solution will create a lot of operational cost.
In mobile applications, we also see a
lot of unique challenges. For instance, a mobile application should also run in
an offline state where you don't have any connectivity. But the application
should provide the full user experience to the user as well. Also, we must cope
with the various device platforms as well as the various devices themselves. So
one from the one manufacturer and others from others. Then we have different brands, and so forth.
Also the application lifecycle,
rolling out a new version of your application needs to be considered. And at
the very end, you also want to know and understand if your application was a
success. So you need to measure if your app is actually being used or not.
To all these challenges, there is a
solution which is SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services.
There are a lot of services on top of
the SAP Cloud Platform, one of them is Mobile services.
On the top, you see the various consumption
models of how you can consume the service. Here we see the native SDKs that we discussed.
We see the mobile development kit and SAP Mobile Cards. As well as other
options to develop mobile applications. On the lower part of the picture, you
see a lot of boxes. And these boxes are structured in three groups. On the
right-hand side, everything that's needed to operate your application at
runtime is listed here.
So, if you have rolled out 5000 application to
the users, you want to manage the traffic of those devices and apps. You want
to manage root causes and troubleshooting sessions, and all this is provided by
the Mobile Services here.
Then in the middle, we see the
security. Everything that has to do with authentication and connectivity to the
back-end systems, which provide the data for your mobile application, is
handled here. So authentication, maybe multi-factor authentication, but also
encryption is taken care of.
On the left-hand side, then you see a
lot of blocks which are labeled app services. Within these app services, you
find reusable components or features that you can put into your application so
that you don't need to solve this business problem or this problem again and again
for each application. Just reuse, for instance, the offline synchronization for
one application, and the second and the third application.
Architecture of Mobile Solution
The overall architecture of mobile
solutions is quite simple. Here again,
on top, you see the various apps that you have built that connect to Mobile Services.
From there, the Mobile Services relay your data
communication to either the SAP systems you have on premise using the SAP Cloud
Connector. You can also connect to your own back end that you have built with
the SAP Cloud Platform itself. And in addition, you can also connect to
third-party APIs using the SAP Open Connectors, for instance.
Mobiles services is available in all
the data centers around the world, and its available in both Neo and Cloud
foundry environment.
Refer to the previous blog, where I
have mentioned the required steps on how to create an account in SAP cloud
platform and a walk through of mobile services admin cockpit.
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