SAP Solutions for Mobile Business | MDK

 

What is SAP Mobile Infrastructure?

Introduction

The SAP Mobile Infrastructure (MI) is a technology platform for offline access to SAP systems or other ERP systems via portable devices like PDAs or laptops. It plays a central role in the technology framework for SAP Solutions for Mobile Business.

When a mobile application is running offline and exchanges data with an application backend system (like any application within mySAP Business Suite or any other legacy application), the underlying technology framework needs to address three key areas:

SAP MI can be looked at from two different angles:

The following section delves deeper into the features of SAP MI.

Client runtime

The SAP MI Client is an entirely Java-based framework offering generic services to mobile applications. It is based on Personal Java 3.1 (itself based on JDK 1.1.8), as only this JDK is typically available on modern PDAs. Due to the downward capability of Java, it can also run on JDK 1.3 and 1.4 as well. In prinicipal, MI hence runs on all platforms supporting Java, like Win32, PocketPC, Mobile Linux, Linux etc. to name a few. For PocketPC2002, MI ships together with an implementation of Personal Java 3.1 VM, as PocketPC does not include Java support directly in the OS. For all other platforms, installation of a JDK is assumed.

MI offers two different UI programming models: Java Server Pages 1.1 (JSP) and Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT). No special OS-specific UI knowledge is therefore needed.
To allow for JSP, MI incorporates a complete Apache Tomcat 3.2.4 servlet engine. The key advantage of JSP support is that development of mobile applications no longer needs a specific 'mobile' skill set, but your standard Internet programming knowledge is leveraged into the mobile arena. MI renders plain HTML and should therefore display equally well on all browsers. Applications can of course make use of special browser features (e.g. JavaScript), but due to the differences between PDA browsers this would mean that they would possibly not run on all platforms supported by MI. SAP tested performance of the JSP programming model extensively and achieved satisfactory results for all modern PDAs.
In special cases, where a browser UI may not be desired (e.g. users should not be offered the freedom of a back-button), AWT can be used instead to design the user interface. One of the key disadvantages of an AWT UI is though, that unlike JSP, UI changes necessarily mean coding changes hence not being able to be performed by non-developers and making additional tests necessary.

For both programming models, MI offers the same generic framework services to mobile application via the MI Client API. This API includes support for data synchronization (Generic and Smart Sync), data persistence (to databases or file system), configuration management (property file handling), logging of error messages, multi-user support , user authorizations and application management.
All mobile applications are registered with the framework and are started via a common homepage that includes links to the applications assigned to the currently logged-in user. Users have their own data area on the device, hence allowing for support of multiple users sharing one device (in a sequential fashion, e.g. shift work).

Data synchronization

The goal of mobile applications is of course to update the backend with the data collected in the field. Thus results the need for a strong data synchronization mechanism as offered by MI:

Administration and deployment

With many independent devices out in the field, administration as well as software logistics and data logistics are crucial to ensure high availability. MI supports the administrator with an automatic, user- and role-based software logistics process and tracing possibilities for remote support of end-users.