Wireless integration with the back office should get a whole lot easier this month as Research in Motion (RIM) Ltd. prepares to offer a new framework for developers.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based company, creator of the BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, plans to unveil a new version of its Mobile Data System (MDS) development framework at this month's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Fla. MDS 4.1 enables wireless applications to integrate with back-end enterprise systems using Web services.
Using the visual design tool in MDS 4.1, developers can browse to any Web Services Description Language file, find the available Web services they'd like to access and simply drag and drop them into their application. The tool then takes care of generating the underlying "plumbing" code, said David Yach, vice president of software at RIM.
The latest version of the development framework consists of three major components: the MDS Studio, the MDS Runtime and MDS Services.
