Idan Ben-Harrush

Industry experience with the IBM Active Middleware Technology (AMiT) Complex Event Processing engine

Complex event processing (CEP) is the analysis of event data in real-time to generate immediate insight and enable instant response to changing conditions. In this paper we share the experience we accumulated over the last decade in designing and deploying CEP applications using the IBM Active Middleware Technology (AMiT) CEP engine, a research asset developed at IBM Research - Haifa. Over the years we applied the technology in solutions for various industries, such as banking, insurance, healthcare, chemical and petroleum and more. In each scenario, the CEP engine was used to address different functional requirements including event-based routing, observation, monitoring and correlation. It was also often required to meet nonfunctional requirements such as scalability and transactional support. We describe several solutions from different domains in which AMiT played at least one of these functional or nonfunctional roles. Our experience shows that across the different industries and applications, using the CEP technology, independent of a specific engine implementation, has been consistently proven to be highly successful. It has played a vital role in designing the applications by providing a means to expressively and flexibly define and maintain the event processing logic of the application, and in runtime by being able to meet all the functional and non-functional requirements without taking a toll on the application performance.

NitroGen: rapid development of mobile applications

Constructing a mobile application is expensive and time consuming. In this paper, we present NitroGen which is a platform independent tool that provides a consumable integrated set of capabilities to construct mobile solutions aiming at reducing development and maintenance costs. NitroGen is a visual, mostly codeless, cloud-based platform to construct mobile applications. It can easily connect to back-end services thus enable fast and facile development in enterprises. Evaluating NitroGen, we found among others, that participants learned it fast and found it simple and suitable for mobile applications development.

Developing enterprise mobile applications the easy way

Constructing a mobile application in the enterprise is expensive and time consuming. On average, deploying a mobile application is estimated at one week of effort per screen. We present an evaluation of NitroGen, a platform-independent tool for constructing mobile solutions. The tool provides a consumable integrated set of capabilities aimed at reducing development and maintenance costs. NitroGen is a mostly codeless, cloud-based, platform for visually constructing mobile applications. We demonstrate how students with some skills in web development and no skills in mobile development have successfully learned and used NitroGen to implement a small-scale three-screen application, which uses existing back-end services—all in less than 90 minutes.

Configuration service for mobile apps

Keeping pace with the market requires software to be shipped quickly, in rapid release cycles with a strong feedback loop. Managing and controlling these changes become complex, especially in the mobile world. In mobile applications, unlike in the Web world, the user chooses whether to download updates or to ignore them, and rollbacks are typically not an option. This paper describes a centralized service that supports managing configuration changes for mobile applications and their backend systems. We describe which implementation decisions we took for our configuration service and how the service was used to support context-based customization of the applications based on user segmentation.

Mobile enablement of business process management suites

Mobile capabilities are expected to fundamentally change the way enterprises operate. However, enterprises encounter technical challenges in mobile enablement of their existing software products. Among the challenges are user experience optimized for mobile, security, management of mobile applications. In this paper we describe technical challenges and solutions in mobile enablement of Business Process Management products, and, in particular, integration of Business Process Management Suites with Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms.