Provide Offline Access to Domino Data from Mobile Applications Using Titanium

Julian Buss, YouAtNotes


November, 2011

Enable your users to access Domino data via their mobile devices when they’re offline. Using the Appcelerator Titanium framework for iOS and Android, you can build native applications that get data from a Domino application and send new or updated data back to Domino. This introduction to using Titanium to synchronize data between Domino and mobile applications covers the basic concepts and important development decisions you need to understand before starting a project, and it walks you through the steps of developing an example application.

Take an existing Domino application, develop a Web version of it, and let your users access it with their mobile device’s browser. Job done, right? But wait, not so fast! Smartphone and tablet users with corporate applications often want to work with their applications while traveling or when they are far from the office. What if your users travel to countries where mobile data traffic is unavailable or very expensive? What happens when they have slow, unstable connections to the Internet or even no connection at all when traveling by plane, train, or car?
If the mobile version of your Domino application needs to be able to run offline, it will need to be able to store data locally, which immediately leads to questions like these:
  • How can you transfer data from Domino to a mobile device, when the mobile device hasn’t any clue about Domino and the standard Domino NSF database?
  • How can your application push data from the mobile device back to Domino? And how can Domino process that data?
  • How is data stored and organized on the mobile device, and how can Domino data fit into that storage format?
  • How can you establish security for the data transfer?
I’ll answer these questions and more and show you how to start creating mobile applications that can get and store Domino data and synchronize their data with Domino. You will learn how to develop your applications using Appcelerator Titanium, which is a framework for developing native applications that run on iOS and Android mobile devices.

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