Bungee Connect White Paper (pdf)

Background

Bungee Labs Corporation was organized to advance and expand the state of world-wide Mobile computing by allowing Enterprise Mobile software applications (CRM, Messaging, and collabotion, Work order processing, Marketing automation, Work flow Financial Reporting, Dashboards, List Management, Integration of services, Inventory control, Human resources management, other) to run on multiple targeted platforms and form factors from a single code base.

With the proliferation of highly interactive mobile devices, including smart phones and tablets, demand for mobile software has increased rapidly. Forrester estimates "that the revenue created from customers buying and downloading apps to smartphones and tablets will reach $38 billion by 2015, up from about $2.5 billion in 2011."
('Mobile App Internet Recasts The Software And Services Landscape')

The first wave of this growth has been primarily small personal applications. Enterprise development is way back, but poised for significant growth. Forrester estimates that "Enterprise business oppportunities for apps will grow vastly over the next four years with companies spending $17 billion creating apps for their products and working with third party services and companies that manage these apps."
('Mobile App Internet Recasts The Software And Services Landscape')

As they consider going Mobile, Enterprise developers face a varierty of difficult questions including:

• Which of the half dozen viable mobile platforms should be supported?
• Which of the multiple form factors (iPhone/iPad) should be supported?
• Should we build native application or web applications?
• Is it more cost-effective to try to modify current applications for the new platforms and form factors or should we just start over?
• How much will it cost to maintain our apps on numerous platforms and form factors?
• Can I get the performance and interactivity my applications need in order to be usable?
• How will I respond to an ever evolving array of platforms and form factors?
• Can I retool my internal skill set for Mobile without disruption, and how long will it take?
• Will this be a distraction from my central mission?

Unfortunate tradeoffs among the above concerns must be made. Re-writing and then maintaining corporate apps on multiple disparate Mobile platforms and form factors is prohibitively expensive and time consuming, even if the company has the expertise in house. It is reasonable to believe that the Mobile landscape will change materially over the next few years, adding much uncertainty to the mix.

Bungee Connect is an Eclipse-based application development framework targeted at Enterprise Java developers. It enables them to build applications that run natively on the desktop, in the browser and on multiple mobile platforms from a single code base. Bungee Connect preserves and utilizes native behaviors and functionality specific to the target platform without losing visual or interactive fidelity. At present, Bungee targets the desktop and four browsers as well as iOS. Android is under development with W8, BlackBerry OS and Facebook to follow. When the Android target is complete, an application built with Bungee Connect for Android will also run natively on iOS iPhone or other targeted platforms.

Existing cross-platform development tool technologies ‘normalize’ (AKA least common denominator) platform-specific access. Cross-platform APIs result in applications that have greatly diminished user experience and product differentiation, and fundamentally lack the ability to address different form factors. Bungee Connect enables developers to customize and adapt to each target platform, thus utilizing the full range of native look, feel and functionality. Bungee also supports the ability to tailor interaction for each specific form factor, even as completely different interactive mechanisms are required or preferred. Bungee’s unique 'Connection' technology offers developers the ability to maintain a single set of application-specific logic where all multiple platform-specific assemblies are connected and configured through a simple design process. For each platform and form factor “targeted” or supported by Bungee Connect, developers can produce programs from the same code base, eliminating the need to rewrite or extensively modify applications in order to run on different platforms.

Bungee will enter early preview in November, 2012 supporting at that time Desktop with SWT(Windows, Mac, Linux), Web with Google GWT (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and iOS (iPhone, iPad). Shortly thereafter, Android will be added. In Q1 of 2013 the company will be adding BlackBerry OS, W8, and Facebook.

Who can use Bungee Connect

Java developers familiar with Eclipse will be most successful with Bungee Connect. The learning curve consists largely of becoming familiar with Eclipse since Bungee Connect is a plugin extension to Eclipse. The developer defines his/her application code in Java using Eclipse. The developer defines the user interfaces for each target and form factor with Bungee Connect's form designer, which automates the connection between views and the underlying application Java code (AKA “Bungee Magic Fingers”). When the developer is ready to deploy, the Bungee Connect framework transcodes the application Java code to the language required by the target platform. (For example, Web - Javascript and iOS - Objective C) Bungee Connect manages the impedance mismatch between different views on different platforms.

Developers can extend Bungee Connect to address a new target not supported out of the box, and can add custom controls for any platform.

While Bungee Connect is a new product, it is based upon technology created under a five year, $25 million investment program established to address the needs of Enterprise developers as they transition to Mobile and Cloud Computing. David Mitchell, CTO and Chief Architect is one of the country’s most experienced development tools and GUI professionals.