MOBILE STRATEGY FOR THE LIVING WEB

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2 MOBILE STRATEGY FOR THE LIVING WEB A MARKET BRIEF OVERVIEW One of the most important decisions companies will make over the next year is what to aim for in a mobile strategy to serve both customers and internal users. Shipments of smart phones and tablets exceeded those of PCs and laptops in the last quarter of Enterprises seeking an optimal mobile strategy need to think about many factors, but the most important are time to market for mobile applications, the reach of those applications, cost, complexity, and user experience. Forward-looking businesses seek the capacity to rapidly build and deploy mobile applications that can reach the maximum number of users at the lowest possible cost while delivering a jaw-dropping, real-time, Living Web experience that is consistent and predictable regardless of a user s network, location or choice of mobile device. Fortunately, three factors have come together to enable a strategy that achieves all of these goals: HTML5, the latest revision to the bedrock Web standard. Besides offering key innovations in how data is processed by browsers, HTML5 also introduces WebSocket, a revolutionary Web communications standard for handling dynamic data and Living Web applications that can be used with native mobile platforms as well as Web applications. Rich ecosystem of mobile application frameworks that developers can use to give HTML5 applications the look, feel and functionality of native apps. The Kaazing Platform, which extends the HTML5 standard in several critical ways. Kaazing ensures that dynamic data flows freely through network intermediaries and can be consumed by every recipient. Kaazing also adds enterprise-grade scalability, security, resilience, and a host of other services that companies are most concerned about when adopting a mobile strategy. This whitepaper discusses how companies can leverage this confluence of factors to make their mobile strategy a competitive advantage. Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 2 kaazing.com

3 THE CHALLENGES WITH MOBILE DEVICE DELUGE The first problem involves the sheer scale and heterogeneity of connected devices. Of the billions of devices already in use, many are smart phones powered by: Apple ios Google Android Blackberry OS Windows Phone Smart phones running other operating systems such as Symbian and WebOS continue to boast significant user bases as well. Even among Android phones, there is a remarkable degree of operating systems fragmentation, with many new handsets running an OS that is several major versions behind. Beyond smart phones, there is an ever larger torrent of connected devices - tablets, Web-enabled television sets, game consoles, household appliances, automobiles, and sensors which may run a completely different set of operating systems. A company that wishes simply to maximize its mobile reach among users running the most prevalent smart phone operating systems must maintain multiple parallel teams to develop and maintain native versions for each of the mobile applications in its portfolio, plus another team to handle desktop Web applications. The cost of employing personnel devoted to platform-specific ports rather than core innovation can prohibitive. The challenge in either case is to maximize reach while simultaneously minimizing cost, complexity and time to market. NO WIRES Another set of challenges is inherent in mobility itself. By definition, mobile must work with devices that have finite battery life, are frequently connected over lower bandwidth or unreliable networks, and are constantly on the move. Despite these constraints, today s mobile users expect to connect any time with the ability to move seamlessly from one network to another without a glitch. To deliver this level of performance, applications must minimize latency, network bandwidth consumption, and battery drain. A VERY TOUGH CROWD The third challenge is to deploy Living Web applications that deliver a user experience that meets or exceeds the lofty expectations of today s mobile audience. Driven mainly by advances in the consumer segment, users have become impatient both at work and play. Across enterprise and consumer markets, people now insist on being socially connected all the time. Moreover, they expect fine-grained personalization of every aspect of their online experience. Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 3 kaazing.com

4 With these three challenges in mind, what is needed is a best-of-all-worlds solution, one that: Works on all mobile devices and browsers Minimizes network bandwidth usage and conserves battery life Leverages the same architecture across the mobile Web, desktop Web and native mobile clients Takes advantage of HTML5 while also extending the reach of clients written in Adobe Flash, Microsoft.NET/Silverlight and other traditional technologies Fully supports pure HTML5 apps, pure native apps and hybrid architectures, along with the option to migrate among them Enables enterprise mobile strategies that are best of breed, fully integrated and easily supported, both now and in the future Provides for faster development and deployment, reduced cost and complexity, A consistently superior Living Web user experience. THE SOLUTION Companies can develop a mobile strategy that overcomes all of these challenges by combining the strengths of HTML5, mobile frameworks, and the Kaazing Platform HTML5 AND FRAMEWORKS The fragmentation in mobile calls out for HTML5, which delivers: Lower time- and cost-to-market. Applications developed in HTML5 can be written once, by Web developers, and used everywhere, on any browser-enabled device. Building native apps, on the other hand, requires specialized developers who have acquired specific skills and knowledge unrelated to their company s core business facility with different programming languages and simulators, detailed knowledge about the technical capabilities of each platform, and an understanding of the vagaries of each version of each platform. With HTML5, one team handles all mobile and desktop platforms, so time and cost to market are slashed and companies find themselves far more nimble and agile. Rich features. Mobile application frameworks such as Sencha Touch, JQuery Mobile and jq.mobi bring powerful, modern desktop browser frameworks to the mobile space along with native mobile app look and feel. While there is still a feature gap between HTML5 and native, it is rapidly closing. For example, HTML5 offers offline storage and access to many hardware features such as GPS and accelerometer. If a required feature is missing, mobile development frameworks such as PhoneGap, appmobi, Titanium and Mono Touch can almost always fill the gap. Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 4 kaazing.com

5 Performance. Mobile must perform like a desktop, and HTML5 WebSockets enables that. More importantly, modern Web runtime engines are fast enough for the vast majority of interactive mobile applications. In addition, the new Web Workers API allows Web applications to be multithreaded, further enhancing performance. Discovery. Unlike native applications, Web applications are indexed by search engines and sharable with a simple URL. Hybrid applications deliver the best of both worlds, offering the benefits of defining your user interface using Web technologies but then wrapping it in a native application suitable for App Store deployment and discovery. Monetization. You can sell a Web app directly which eliminates the the steep tax charged by native app stores. Of course, the developer still has the option of submitting to an app store by wrapping the app in a native wrapper such as Nimblekit or Webworks. KAAZING PLATFORM For pure Web apps, pure native apps or hybrid apps, Kaazing delivers features and capabilities that augment HTML5 and mobile frameworks and are essential to an enterprise mobile strategy. Jaw-dropping user experience If user experience is not consistently superior, any mobile strategy will fail regardless of its other merits. With HTML5 WebSocket, applications become real-time and dynamic. But to offer a consistently superior Living Web experience, WebSocket is only the beginning. Consistency means that applications scale well; i.e., provide the same level of performance regardless of how many connected users are accessing it. Consistency requires that applications work on every mobile browser and every mobile device. And consistency means that dynamic data is able to flow transparently through any mobile network intermediaries that may be present, many of which will stop native WebSocket traffic. Kaazing Platform addresses all of these critical user experience challenges. With its unique Peer Load Balancing capability, Kaazing WebSocket Gateway scales easily to handle enormous numbers of concurrent users and massive throughput requirements with sub-millisecond added latency. Kaazing s unique ability to offload connection overhead and distribute load across a hierarchy of Gateways means that the platform scales architecturally rather than by brute force, allowing far higher capacity deployments than other approaches can deliver. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway is the only solution that emulates WebSocket functionality in all environments and with near-native performance. Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 5 kaazing.com

6 Regardless of scale or location, device or browser, with Kaazing every user receives a first-class Living Web experience. Security in Mobile Environments If there is one concern on the minds of companies supporting mobile, it is security. Kaazing Platform was built from the ground up for secure environments. Kaazing supports standard TLS/SSL encryption for data protection over the wire, basic as well as token-based authentication, and fine-grained authorization The Kaazing Platform is the only WebSocket platform that supports SPNEGO-based Kerberos security across a WebSocket connection. Kaazing users can integrate Kerberos with their existing infrastructure to provide Single Sign-On (SSO) capability across the mobile Web, or they can use the token-based authentication to integrate with any third party or custom SSO framework. Another innovation unique to Kaazing is automatic revalidation, a WebSocket extension that ensures without introducing any service interruption that WebSocket connections do not outlive their authorizing credentials. Kaazing is also alone in allowing customers to set a strict upper limit on connection time, after which the WebSocket connection is guaranteed to close. Kaazing s strong focus on security can ease concerns that would otherwise delay or temper a move to mobile. Standards compliant and ecosystem certified Kaazing WebSocket Gateway is 100% standards based. It fully implements the W3C HTML5 Communication specifications and IETF WebSocket protocol.. Maximize battery life and minimize bandwidth and data costs A primary means of extending battery life is minimizing the number of bytes received and sent over the wire. HTML5 is ideally suited to this task. HTTP headers contain hundreds or even thousands of bytes of metadata. Most interactive Web communication, especially over mobile, takes place in small batches, making the repeated metadata a significant percentage of each communication. With WebSocket, metadata can be reduced by more than 99% depending on the message pattern. Kaazing maintains these savings even when WebSocket connectivity is not possible and the application must fall back to HTTP.. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway emulates WebSocket connectivity with near-native performance. As a result, bandwidth usage, data cost and battery drain are always minimized. Mitigates slow or unreliable networks Because total traffic is reduced, connection performance is increased. Users on slow networks will see performance gains. Reduces costs and increase performance of integrations With mobile applications being used for more and more tasks, the ability to integrate full-featured messaging systems with mobile solutions is absolutely critical. Companies must be able to extend their backend messaging systems out to the mobile Web. Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 6 kaazing.com

7 WebSocket is the ideal transport for this task, since higher-level messaging protocols and APIs can ride on top of WebSocket; HTTP cannot transport these protocols. But like any socket, native WebSocket is an empty pipe. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway provides the structure necessary to run higher-level protocols over WebSocket, whether JMS, AMQP, or any of the proprietary or custom formats on which business communication is based. What is more, Kaazing s JMS, AMQP and XMPP editions make it possible out of the box to deploy back-end messaging systems out to the Web. Minimizes time-to-market and cost-to-market With Kaazing, companies can develop, test, deploy and support only a single code base per application rather than multiple native code bases, and costs and time-to-market are cut by up to two-thirds. Kaazing also allows companies to reuse their desktop web channel across themes, graphics, application and business logic, and backend services (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, services, etc.) More importantly, creating even one globally scalable application with Kaazing requires only a fraction of the total time and cost needed to build the same application without Kaazing. That is because the architecture enabled by Kaazing scales automatically. Often one is able to build and even deploy a prototype application very quickly; but when that application must scale, problems rear their ugly heads, often requiring that the code be rewritten or entirely re-architected. With Kaazing, the prototype application and the globally deployed production version are identical; it is the Kaazing infrastructure that ensures scalability and the power to match increased requirements with increased throughput without having to modify to the application. In the same vein, Kaazing WebSocket Gateway provides the full suite of enterprise-grade capabilities required for any enterprise application, especially a mobile app. Supports Web, Native Mobile and Hybrid Applications Kaazing s native client libraries for ios and Android; Flash/Flex,.NET/Silverlight and other traditional Web technologies; and of course HTML5 give developers and architects maximum flexibility in designing applications and Web infrastructure that precisely match any set of requirements. USE CASES NOTIFICATIONS Push notification services operated by Apple, Google and Blackberry are excellent at pushing very small notification payloads to mobile applications. Third party providers such as appmobi and Urban Airship offer rich push services that can push much larger content packages to mobile app. They offer a user-friendly, cross-platform front-end for composing messages, but on the backend they simply leverage these same push services from Apple and Google. The Kaazing Platform is complimentary with push notification services. With architecture like the one pictured below, Kaazing infrastructure can provide a fine-grained, fullduplex, in-app messaging capability; while coarse grained, unidirectional, background Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 7 kaazing.com

8 push notifications can be provided by the platforms core services. The architecture includes a back-end bridge from the message broker onto the notification service. SITUATION MANAGEMENT Businesses must have a plan for every contingency; often, success or failure in crisis situations will hinge on how quickly and effectively the company can communicate with all its stakeholders, including customers, partners, employees, and officials. Today, the most critical communication channel by far is the mobile channel. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway can be used to build a robust and ready situation management capability. For example, airlines understand that they will frequently face situations that involve flight delays (heavy snowfall, volcanic ash, security alerts). By planning ahead, an airline can develop a mobile communications solution to be used in instances of delay or crisis to communicate with ground personnel, other airline employees, airport and local authorities, and perhaps most importantly of all, passengers. To be effective, the airline will have to support multiple (ideally all) platforms and devices and be able to deliver new applications to market rapidly; and the solution will have to be highly scalable, lowlatency, battery-life friendly, and able to integrate out-of-the-box with existing messaging systems and other IT infrastructure. Kaazing s unified architecture and mobile capabilities provide a compelling solution for applications of this kind. RETAIL At the dawn of the Internet age, it appeared that brick and mortar stores might go the way of the dinosaur as online competitors easily undercut them on overhead expense and, just as importantly, customers found that they could discover far more about Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 8 kaazing.com

9 products online than they could in person. Today, some would argue that the tables have turned: while the largest online retailers must match the logistics expense of chain stores, brick and mortar retailers have shoppers physically present and can deliver online information to them in real time. But brick and mortars can leverage this advantage only by deploying rich, immersive, contextually relevant and above all real-time applications into the hands (handsets) of their shoppers. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway is the ideal enterprise-grade IT infrastructure to develop, deploy and support the Living Web applications that will keep customers coming through the doors. MOBILE ADVERTISING The key to successful mobile advertising is contextual relevance, speed and latency. Mobile advertising networks often have access to volumes of data unavailable to traditional online ad networks, including location and social data. The challenge is to use that data to target the most relevant ads to users at the instant they are most likely to care. Whatever the segment, from in-store shopping promotions to in-game betting opportunities, the requirements include very high performance and low latency, extreme scalability, two-way communication, and of course security precisely the attributes that Kaazing WebSocket Gateway provides. HEALTHCARE AND E-RECORDS Timeliness and relevancy of data is never more critical than when lives are at stake. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway provides the features and functionality that must lie at the heart of any healthcare-related application. The costs of implementing anything less are simply prohibitive. SUMMARY The growth of mobile computing has been nothing short of remarkable. As organizations race to adopt a mobile strategy that will position them ahead of the wave, they face a number of competing requirements. Their strategy must deliver mobile apps that give the widest possible audience of users a true Living Web experience. It must allow developers to put new apps in the hands of users quickly and efficiently, with maximum reuse of existing resources. And of course, it must accomplish all these goals at the lowest possible cost and with minimal added IT complexity. Fortunately, three factors have recently emerged to enable a strategy that achieves all of these goals. HTML5 and mobile application frameworks combine to bring the full richness and promise of native technologies to the Web. Kaazing WebSocket Gateway extends the HTML5 standards and integrates with mobile frameworks to allow organizations to prototype, build and deploy native, Web and hybrid mobile applications that are globally scalable, universally accessible, battery and bandwidth efficient, dynamic, interactive, and as secure and resilient as any enterprise application. To learn more about Kaazing WebSocket Gateway, visit us at Copyright 2012 Kaazing Corporation 9 kaazing.com