TANGO: A Flexible Mobility-Enabled Architecture for Online and Offline Mobile Enterprise Applications

A mobility-enabled architecture is usually required to facilitate the access of enterprise systems from mobile devices. Typically, mobility enabled architectures are separated in online architectures and offline architectures. The online architectures enable mobile clients to use the online model in which mobile clients access business logic and data located on backend systems using remote invocations. The offline architectures enable mobile clients to use the offline model in which mobile clients access business data locally on devices, and periodically synchronize data with backend systems. The selection of the architecture is based on the needs of the scenarios in accordance with the user requirements. For an enterprise system, there is usually more than one mobile scenario, and hence both online and offline architectures might be required. In this case, the discrepancies between the two architectures will increase the cost and decrease the interoperability between different solutions. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an innovative and lexible mobility enabled architecture that can be configured to be an online, an offline, or a mixed architecture in a unified framework. Using this architecture, different types (online, offline, or mixed) of mobile client applications could be built for different scenarios according to the user requirements. These applications can share the same mid-tier framework and access the same backend systems. Moreover, in this architecture, a unified access model to business logic is proposed to make it possible to adapt in time a mobile application from the online model to the offline model without architectural changes and vice versa. This paper introduces the basic requirements to build such an architecture, defines basic modules of the architecture and shows how to adapt this architecture to different (online, offline, or mixed) architectures using different configurations.