2.1 Mobile Engine – What is it?
The concept of mySAP® Mobile
Business is based on an open standard-platform, the SAP Mobile
Engine. Mobile Engine is implemented on mobile devices as an
integral component of MySAP® Technology. The core components of a
Mobile Engine environment are:
- Local Web Server (For mobile device)
- Database Layer
- Business Logic
- Data Synchronization and Replication Layers
- Deployment Console
The article will discuss all these
components in detail, in the next section, Mobile Engine
Architecture. Mobile Engine adopted an open standard platform to
support all existing wireless devices such as handheld, Laptops, and
PDAs and enable deployment across various types of networks like
Bluetooth, WAN, GPRS.
Since SAP Mobile Engine is built
on open industry standards, it supports Java technology, which is
based on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVM provides a development
environment for JSP (Java Server Pages) and Java 2 platform. It also
complies with the Web Services technology that includes SOAP and
XML. Developers can exploit the open source technology to develop
network and device independent applications.
It also enables enterprises to
implement mobile enterprise applications to internal and external
users in both online and offline mode. In online mode, mobile users
can access the SAP systems using browser interface while in offline
mode mobile users access SAP system using the native interface of
the mobile device (See Figure 1).
Mobile Engine facilitates mobile
applications for various enterprise scenarios such as Human
Resources (HR), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Business
Intelligence etc.
Figure 1: SAP Mobile Engine
Interfaces
