MsgConnecting,Desktops,and,Mob computer MsgConnecting Desktops and Mobile Devices

Gone are those times when the companies and the organisations didn't need a hi-tech system to handle them. Owing to the considerable increase in the business sector and thus, an enormous increase in the complexity of the organisational struc ----------------------------------------------------------Permission is granted for the below article to forward,reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website,offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as longas no changes a

First of all, whatdo we call a framework?We assume that this is a common code that provides genericfunctionality and can be selectively overridden or extended byuser code to provide specific functionality. Frameworkis a special case of software library, and its key features arereusabilityand a well-defined API.Second, what weshould take into account talking about a mobiledevice? Most of them are smart phones,PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant), tablet computers and netbooks. Talking about PDA, we haveto mention a group of EDA, Enterprise Digital Assistants, which arevery much like PDA, but in some sense are more specific, designed andprogrammed for certain enterprise tasks, often offering integrateddata capture devices like barcode and smart card readers. The most PDAs are workingon specialized operating systems, some of them of Windows family(e.g. WindowsCE, Windows Mobile, Windows PocketPC, Windows XP TabletEdition), others on Linux, Palm etc. For smart phones verypopular are Android and BlackBerry operating systems.Taking all this inmind, we will call a mobiledevice some relatively smallcomputer that works on one of platforms mentioned above. Thoughsometimes you may hear or read speculations about notebookvs. desktop computer, in this articlewe don't assume a conventional notebook to be a mobile device;instead we will refer it like desktop. So What?Lets imagine that youhave to develop a software of enterprise level, for managingsomething like plant, or business office, or… or hotel! Why hotel?Why not. Everybody knows something about hotel, and nobody knowseverything. Its technology is complex enough to utilize most ofmobile devices mentioned in previous section. For example, youwill need to create a database, and most of mobile devices (EDAs ofhotel personal) will communicate to it. Hotel needs a strong securitysystem to identify its staff and to check their access rights forthis or that. This system is logically to be implemented on datacapture devices integrated in EDAs, like fingerprints scanners. It is very likely that ourhotel is not appears to be a brilliant one in sense oftourist business, but please don't bother about it. We need thishotel not to enjoy a holyday but to demonstrate the abilities ofMsgConnect, which are much better.What Do You Have to Care About?First, you haveto design a database, and of course, it will not reside on mobiledevice, consider placing it somewhere in a reliable place. Maybe use cloud storage?This database will hold everything about your hotel, from actualvisitors and reservations to vacant rooms to drinks and foodsavailable and required. We will not bother aboutbusiness logic of the system, but anyway you have to think about alot of desktops or notebooks for high-level managers inoffices. From time to time they will make requests to the database,something like: "How many vacant rooms do we have for now?Is it enough scotch on stock? What is the visitor NN check out date?"And finally, don'tforget about mobile devices! Each hostess should have an EDA, andeach barman as well, with barcode or smart card readersavailable. Some of security guys probably will have EDA withautomatic identification system embedded. Not to mention aclimate control, which should be of course automatic and drivenby mobile devices with embedded systems, but occasionallysome responsible person must have a possibility to interfere inits functionality, optionally from desktop or from EDA. Multiple PlatformsPDAs and EDAs areavailable on a variety of different platforms like clones of Windows(e.g. WindowsCE, Windows Mobile, Windows PocketPC, Windows XP TabletEdition), Linux, Palm and others. A great part of smartphones are working on the Android and BlackBerry operating systems.It is very likely that youwill have to deal with several different platforms. You hardly canmanage all these things on single or on few related platforms;obviously this will make the task of communicating between computersnot trivial. PDA Operating Systemvendors usually provide a way for synchronizing data between desktopoperating systems and their product, however thereare numerous serious limitations.Fortunately MsgConnect gives you the way to overcome theselimitations.MsgConnect is based on theconcept of exchanging messages — blocks of data that have afixed part with predefined fields and optionally have a data part.Using messages you can send commands to other processes, receivereplies, transfer the data across multiple processes and do plenty ofother useful things. Having taken theconcept from Windows Messaging subsystem, MsgConnect however is notlimited to Windows only. MsgConnect was successfully ported todifferent platforms. There are availableimplementations for Windows, Android, BlackBerry, Linux, FreeBSD,QNX, Windows CE/ PocketPC, Java™ (SE/EE, ME) and .NETplatforms. More platforms are to come.How Can You Manage?It's not easy. It's verydifficult to connect dozens of computers working on differentplatforms and make them communicate to each other unless you areusing MsgConnect.MsgConnect (readMessage-Connect) simplifies your applicationdevelopment significantly by taking care of all the low-leveltasks for you. It was designed to be small, fast and effective and atthe same time to provide complete service. With MsgConnect you won'thave to write and painfully test multithreaded server code, youwon't need to split the data stream into messages and dispatchthese messages. All your efforts will be directed atbusiness logic whilst MsgConnect takes care about data and messagestransfer.MsgConnect wasborn as emulation of Windows Messaging subsystem for sending messagesacross the network. The idea was successful and Eldos' engineersextended it. Now MsgConnect is widely used by developers to implementdata transfer between applications running on the same computer or onvarious mobile devices like Android, BlackBerry (through JavaMobile), iPhone (!++ version for MacOS Xand iPhone/iPad).While utilizing the sameconcept of message queue that was used in Windows, MsgConnectprovides much more reliability and functionality like identification,on-the-fly compression, encryption and integrity checking of themessage being sent and received. With MsgConnect you don't care abouttransferring data, instead you just send messages (which can containall necessary data).With MsgConnect youuse methods similar to Windows' messaging subsystem — SendMessageto send a message with a confirmation of a second party, PostMessageto transmit data without confirmation, SendMessageCallBackto send a message and be notified through user-defined callbackroutine.Client-server technologyNaturally, some of thetasks for your hotel management can be completed using traditionalclient-server technology, for example most of requests to databaseconcerning stock value of something, booking of rooms etc. Client-server architecturegained significant place in current networking due to ease of logicalorganization and maintenance. The concept of conversation between aclient and a server is not hard to design, create and document.However from the technicalpoint of view creation of effective server software can be a long andpainful process. The things can become much worse if the server needsto send the unrequested data to the client, i.e. act as a clientitself. On this stage one has to redesign the completeprotocol stack to add such a possibility.MsgConnect dramatically simplifiesthe process of data exchange by offering a flexible andefficient messaging paradigm by providing an independentbi-directional conversation via single connection (you just split oneconnection into two). Moreover, MsgConnect providesa simple way to create event-driven communicationsbetween clients and servers, and such a scheme is usually moreeasy to design and is much more scalable.Peer-to-peer data transferEach node in distributedsystem based on MsgConnect can act as both client andserver simultaneously. MsgConnect can use single connection totransfer messages independently in both directions. This kind offunctionality might be very powerful when your application has toalarm some certain PDA or return back some signals, for examplelow stock of food or drinks. Standard ProtocolsWith MsgConnect youuse all the power of standard protocols including TCP and UDP, ifyour target platform supports them. Of course you may use for thatpurpose your OS' native API, for example WinAPI in case of Windows.But choosing this way you will have to write different code for eachplatform, while choosing MsgConnect and using its API, you obtainreally reusable code.With MsgConnect you willbe able to utilize the power of heterogeneous systems andnetworks ranging from Unix servers to Windows-based PDAs,EDAs and smart phones.