From the initial idea to deployment

The networked world today requires a powerful and flexible integration of mobile data acquisition devices in most commercial areas. While the apps in the Apple world hardly allow any really long-term application development without Xcode, in the Android world it is also difficult to be competitive without Android Studio. Alternative concepts such as the FMX implementation in more recent Delphi versions as well as Xamarin or similar frameworks promise multi-platform capability, the reality however is somewhat different. The first rollout of a native app requires a lot of know-how, and even seemingly trivial problems can cause long waiting times until the full version can be used by the customer.

If you are a software manufacturer and want to expand your ERP or business software by offering a flexible module for mobile devices, you will find several man-months or even man-years of development work, which can hardly be refinanced. Your customers expect such a feature on their own smartphones; however they are not willing to pay additional costs.

A decision to use only Android as a platform will not be acceptable for customers with Apple devices, so that the iOS platform for Apple also needs to be implemented. The development costs thus double and even a mundane task, such as mobile time tracking for field service technicians must also be implemented on these two platforms, in addition to the back-office solution for the office employees or on laptops, for which the source code cannot be used across multiple platforms.

Let’s stay with the example of mobile time tracking and consider alternative methods. Certainly, there are places where mobile phone reception is not always available or poor, but generally it can be assumes in most areas of Western Europe that a sufficiently good connection can be ensured. This is certainly a different matter in the Australian outback, but in such a case we would use a fully-fledged replicated database on a laptop, to enable access to even large amounts of data at any time.

In our 2-day training course Bootcamp database web applications using Firebird, you will learn all knowledge necessary to visualize data from a Firebird database via an Apache web server on Windows or Linux with minimal PHP knowledge.

A registration of the mobile device can be permanently assigned by URL or an individual view of the assigned data is displayed interactively using the Username and Password. In this way the sample application "Mobile Time Tracking" can display instructions for selection directly assigned to the user of the mobile device, minimizing errors such as booking time to the wrong jobs.

Simple control elements, known in the Delphi world as TLabel, TEdit, TMemo, TCombobox, TButton, TListbox, etc., are recorded on the website by the logic instructions, which are implemented in Firebird stored procedures, and filled with data from the database. The user can now enter numbers or strings depending upon the task, or simply trigger a Start- or Stop-booking with a simple click.

The resulting data is written back into the Firebird database by the Apache/PHP script. These can create messages at any time via triggers and events in the back office, and can alert the person responsible to new mobile data, or can be fully automated in collective bills.

You have no PHP experience? No problem, the PHP script used contains only around 30 lines and these will only altered in very few places during the whole training.

Do you lack basic knowledge of HTML controls? During the course, we will provide you with all the necessary basic knowledge, enabling you to extend this knowledge yourself at any time in the future.

You have never set up an Apache web server on Windows or Linux with PHP, or set up PHP access to Firebird? This is also part of our training. We’ll set up a virtual Windows server together. This server with the exact same configuration is offered by Hosteurope for EUR 9.90 a month.

How do you get the data rapidly from the local database to the Firebird database on the virtual server, without having to store all data there, and to make it publicly available in case of a faulty configuration? We explain the most important security aspects of such a Firebird configuration and show how to exchange data between the customer server and the server on the VM in near real-time using the push-pull principle.

Does this work even if the data is not stored locally in Firebird databases? Yes, we use IBEScript to show you basic IBEBlock scripts, which allow you to connect to any ODBC-compliant database to write the local data into your Firebird database vice versa.

How can the server-side application be used to send e-mails and generate PDFs, for example, to automatically generate order confirmations around the clock? We will show you how it is possible to use the IBEBlock Script on the server side. In addition to Windows for IBEscript.exe, we can also use Linux with Wine.

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