Bright Software develops rapid application development tools for producing end-to-end mobile field force automation solutions. This suite of tools provides an out-of-the-box solution for simplifying the design, implementation and deployment of mobile applications for all types of remote field users.
Software development nowadays is a very expensive, tedious and labour intensive task. Highly skilled computer specialists are required, huge resources are needed to verify the end results thus making it impossible to implement and adopt affordable end user and business solutions especially in the field of mobile applications.
Bright Software provides a solution to this problem by supplying systems, tools, and application development tools that reduce or eliminate some of the software development activities like implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance. This minimizes resources and time to design and implement affordable solutions for every business whether it is a small or big organization, saving the need of in-house software development teams and highly skilled software developers. It allows the solution provider to focus on the end-user and business requirements instead of the complexities and problems of the software development processes.
The BrightXpress Mobility Suite consists of four related modules, namely BrightBuilder, BrightForms, BrightServer and the Integration Engine as shown below.
Figure 1: BrightXpress Mobility Suite Architecture
BrightBuilder™ is Bright Software's application design, implementation, testing, and deployment tool. The system analysts, business analysts, systems engineers and integrators can use BrightBuilder to define an end-user application from start to end. Programming skills are not required. It generates XML based application definitions that is exported or deployed to BrightServer for distribution to the field clients running BrightForms.
BrightForms™ is the form execution engine that receives and processes the XML-based application definitions produced by BrightBuilder. The engine passes data in both directions between a local database and a server in an optimised manner over various types of networks. BrightForms has built-in capabilities for synchronising data to and from the server installed at the customers back office.
BrightServer™ is the mobile data gateway. It provides a gateway to the back-office systems including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, etc. It handles the data exchange (synchronisation) to and from the field clients running BrightForms. It handles the authentication and data synchronisation over a secure http connection using SSL (secure socket layer) with communications protocols based on the open industry standard SOAP. BrightServer can in integrate into legacy systems, JDBC/ODBC data sources, file data sources and every enterprise resource planning (ERP) software via their API set.
Integration Engine is the integration engine that provides seamless integration into almost any system data source. It supports file import and export in CSV and fixed file length formats, and also provides a push module to push data to BrightForms field clients and email servers. BrightIntegrator can be fully configured to transfer data between various data sources with an XML based configuration. Separate documentation for BrightIntegrator is provided with the BrightIntegrator installation program.
Tracing and application distribution frameworks are incorporated into the BrightForms and BrightServer products from ground up. They are an integral part of the Bright Software offering.
Sophisticated trouble-shooting and tracing tools are provided both on the client and server side. The tracing level can be adjusted to suit the problem at hand. Tracing is a great help to the system management people when identifying the end user problems in the field as well as the server issues and problems at the back office.
Application Distribution and updates are another important built-in feature, which allows the companies to deploy and maintain applications in the field for very large user bases.
The BrightXpress Mobility Suite also allows the user to make online queries to the server without the need to save the records in the local database. This allows the end user to view a snap shot of the back-end database. With the use of this feature, data transfer is optimised and records do not have to be saved to the local database.
The Stored Procedures built-in feature can also be used to access user-defined procedures from the server. This allows the user to run the stored procedures over the server tables. These stored procedures allow the designer to create complex queries and reporting capabilities for the backend application.
With the BrightXpress Mobility Suite, the designer can create rich client applications with stand-alone databases that synchronise with the server, or thin client applications which can access the server tables online.