DEVELOPERS BLOG

Building Bridges for Enterprise Mobility with NodeJS

Bridge

When mobilizing a company, there will be challenges to gain access to platforms, data and processes, that are siloed of in monolithic stacks and session based transports. With the connectivity and bandwidth challenges of mobility, it’s hard to build upon the traditional Enterprise Technology stacks. Mobility uses high volume, high transactional, non-session based transactions and requires a different approach.

A new paradigm

Mobility changes how we use IT services and solutions. With its 24/7 always on nature, it creates new windows of opportunities and possibilities, but it also comes with challenges for the existing Enterprise Architecture in many larger companies. Traditional Enterprise Architecture is based on high bandwidth, low transactions, session-based communications. Mobility does not have that luxury; a device with a mobile connection has limited bandwidth and doesn’t always have connectivity.

To mitigate these challenges, mobility uses non-session based, high volume transactional, small bits of communications, to reduce the overhead of dropped sessions and ensure responsiveness in communication and the actual application usage on the devices.

In mobility almost everyone is standardizing on RESTfull web API’s/ web services to provide that type of communication for mobility.

Building Bridges

Trying to pry everything out of the existing systems and build a complete new Architecture takes time and is a gradual process; while mobile needs are rising now, as they are the key for many companies to differentiate themselves, increase productivity and efficiency.

So to be able to move forward, bridges need to be built.

One of those bridges is provided by NodeJS. NodeJS is the standalone JavaScript run-time engine that also powers Google’s Chrome browser. NodeJS is great for mobile when using HTML5 as the platform to build your Enterprise Application with. You can have both JavaScript on the Server and in the Client, use the same objects and data bindings, allowing much reuse of code on both client and server.

Additionally NodeJS provides exactly the right communication profile based on http(s) for mobile and allows both great horizontal and vertical scaling, allowing for extreme high volume of transactions.

To top it off there are over 77,000 modules available for NodeJS that help to connect to your existing Enterprise Systems; Oracle, MS SQL, SAP to LDAP, Active Directory, Sharepoint and many, many others.

Crossing the bridge

Leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 for connectivity and security, you can use the Github sample LDAP Search.
The Sample shows how to setup and configure a NodeJS server that provides a small Web API, to do LDAP searches against your own LDAP directory (for example your corporate Active Directory), to find your colleagues.

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