A few years back for a TechEd presentation myself and my colleagues John Polus and Tobias Kaufman were asked to do a presentation on Mobile within BW and the Enterprise Portal. It was fantastic. All the cool bells and whistles of cutting edge technology; BW on the go no matter where you were and what you were doing. I stayed pretty hot on mobile technology for a good time after that but with the EP switching over from EP5 to EP6 everything became a blur. Actually it was a blur that brought me right to the beginning of December 2004. I was asked along with another colleague to start brushing up on mobile technologies within SAP and NetWeaver.
It looks like we have come quite a ways in the last couple of years. Did you know that SAP Mobile now supports, WAP, wireless LANs, Bluetooth, and/or GPRS and that our new mobile technology is linked directly to the webserver that is pumping out the requests? All in all SAP and mobile have come a long way in just a few short years.
We now have far different tools at our disposal. Tools that will allow special features on mobile devices like easy to use web controls that a developer can write into the mobile code. That way the capabilities of the browser on the mobile device are accounted for and the display and utilities that are displayed can be dealt with for the specific mobile devices displaying the data.
There are also Mobile Extensions to the Java Servlet Container. These extensions encorporate com.sap.mobile.clientinfo packages into the mobile code to allow specific device handling right down to input and display field as well as programming applications that are ultimately browser and device-independent. We are also pushing our Model View controller Architecture within mobile now.
I am looking forward to getting back on the mobile wagon and seeing where it takes me in this coming year.
