Integrating with IBM MobileFirst
You can integrate WebSphere® Portal with MobileFirst to provide multi-channel support to your web communities. You can create a hybrid application that adds native device functions and a unified web experience on mobile device browsers and in mobile device native applications. You can use MobileFirst to create a hybrid application that adds native device functions to your portal.
There are three types of applications you can create for your cross-platform environments with WebSphere Portal and MobileFirst.
- Native applications
- Native applications for enterprise mobile apps have the highest UI fidelity and range of function of the types of web applications included here, but have the highest cost to develop and maintain. Cross-platform issues can increase costs, and mobile operating system updates can require frequent updates to be submitted in application stores. MobileFirst provides tools to reduce costs.
- Pure web applications
- Pure web applications that are based on HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, or that use client-side frameworks like Dojo and jQuery, provide a simple way to make mobile-friendly websites. Development and maintenance costs are less expensive. You can work more easily across multiple devices and are not typically impacted by mobile operating system updates. WebSphere Portal provides a platform for pure web applications and websites. With a pure web application, you only have access to the native device features that the browser provides to you, and you are more limited in the user interface fidelity.
- Hybrid applications
- Hybrid applications combine the characteristics of pure and native applications. You can build an application with the simplicity of developing with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. But you can augment that with a wide range of native services and produce an application for application stores. With technology like Apache Cordova, which MobileFirst includes, you can call native features with JavaScript from your web markup. For example, you can call the camera with a simple JavaScript line, such as: navigator.camera.getPicture. MobileFirst provides tools for creating these hybrid applications. Hybrid applications are native applications that wrap the WebSphere Portal web application. The two are tightly integrated to use each other's capabilities to make the development experience as quick and easy as possible.
As a WebSphere Portal customer, you can use the MobileFirst tools for free and create two free applications. But the applications must be hybrid applications that use WebSphere Portal.