Our existing WebSphere and Portal customers started seeing an interesting trend over the last six to twelve months. They were noticing a sudden surge of traffic coming from smart devices and the desktop traffic was tapering.

Their sites were not optimized for the different dimensions of disparate devices accessing their site nor were they optimized to leverage the multi-touch technology.

On the other hand, their competitors were racing to embrace the new smart device wave and creating smart web-fronts at a frivolous pace and along the way there were spending millions.

Our customers were looking for a future strategy to extend their WebSphere investments to Smart Devices. Objective was to construct a plan that would give them short and quick wins by rapidly creating smart web-fronts and take leadership role in technology adoption or in some instances merely respond to the competition – The need was urgent - yet, the ploy had to work and sustain in the long run as well. Native applications were controlled by the likes of Apple and Google via their stores – access control and problems like LDAP security were still question marks? On the other hand browser based application presented equally powerful options.

In many cases, our clients already had their desktop web-front running on WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Portal Server and they had manually hand-coded written JSPs written over different frame-works (MVC, Struts, JSF et al). Now they were getting push from the business as they were handing out use-cases to surface the same data, content and processes via smart devices – for one, that’s where the user population was migrating and more importantly with smart devices now the users had a complete browser and high speed internet connection in the palm of their hands. The impact it would have on existing processes would be deep and powerful. In some cases it was changing ways business was getting conducted. While the drivers were powerful and ROI compelling – however, manually coding variants of thousands of these JSPs using traditional hand-coding techniques was a risky proposition. The smart device market was still immature and the number of devices, hardware and browser combinations were mind boggling. Making manual modifications to existing view layer (JSPs) to adjust for the number of smart device variants was not an option. Further, how would they manage and maintain these thousands of lines of code and their variants? Many of our clients had large off-shore teams that were managing these applications and they needed a controlled way to create smart interfaces that would ensure faster creation the first time at a lower cost yet have lower maintenance and operational cost.

That’s when they turned to Streebo, a thought leader in software automation – Streebo labs collaborates closely with IBM engineering and research teams on a number of strategic initiatives. We turned to our research and development colleagues in IBM Labs - IBM came back with a recommendation to use WebSphere Portlet Factory to automate creation of all smart Interfaces. Download the “Smart Device application development using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory” white paper from IBM Cambridge Labs (Engineering) here.

IBM points out that the profiling technology automates the creation of multiple webapps and thus you capture the business problem just once in a Factory model and the automation regeneration engine then manages code creation for execution on these various devices. Further, starting with Portlet Factory version 7, IBM added out of the box support for customization and selection handlers for Smart Phones. Profiles have been included in smart device assets for IPhone, IPad, Droid and Blackberry.

IBM engineering team has added this as a way to get customers started with smart phone web application development.

Customers can now create standard web apps, Portlets or Widgets – all from the same code base.

Streebo took the recommended IBM approach and has automated the smart user interface creation for many of customers using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, WebSphere Dashboard Framework and Widget Factory components. Further, we have captured many of the commonly occurring and repeated business use-cases for Smart Devices as Streebo Smart Parts™. These Smart Parts™ are a collection of models, builders and lego pieces that accelerate the transition from a “web-front” to a “Smart Web-Front”. Now your WebSphere powered “smart web-front” will serve up your desktop users AND support users hitting your WebSphere application or portal site from Smart Devices – allowing your applications to take advantage of geo-location and multi-touch, rotation rendering and many such smart device features. Your Smart Web-Front will be optimized for a human finger touch rather than a click of a mouse. This will ensure that you are serving your user population through all fronts in the most optimized fashion. Your user base can get to their data, content and processes via the smart devices. The idea is now to model it just once and IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory would then automate the creation of smart interfaces for the remainder devices via the profiling technology. Also, if the solution was getting delivered using Factory – whether it was getting assembled by an offshore developer or an in-house development team – you can be assured that it is compliant with the latest standard and in-line with IBM best practices. This has dramatically reduced the overheads and cost for many of our clients, especially in operations and maintenance of the solution assets.

Streebo Smart Portlet Package is an easy way for customers to get jump-started on their smart device strategy.

With Streebo Smart Portlet Package you place an order for a set of functionality you want to extend and we manufacture and assemble your solution using standard compliant and IBM supported Smart parts.

We help our customers through deployment and occasionally on post-production support. Our team of automation lab engineers will conduct knowledge transfer along the way so your IT staff can take over the maintenances and enhancement of the solution the Smart Portlet Package will deliver. 

IBM provides readily available enterprise connectors that can be readily surfaced on Smart Devices. IBM provides out of the box for the following components.

When a Fortune 500 financial services giant wanted to extend legacy mainframe data on Smart Devices read about why they turned to Streebo – ask us how Streebo Smart Portlet Package and IBM Factory automation technology can get you started with a Smart Web-Front.