Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Altova MobileTogether

Software engineers have long wanted to create an application once and run it on multiple platforms. With today’s rapidly evolving mobile devices, the problem is even more urgent, as iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Surface tablets all compete for developer resources.

If you’re working on apps to communicate with enterprise users, you risk disenfranchising and alienating influential and important subsets of your colleagues when you build for each device sequentially or deliver unequal functionality.

Altova MobileTogether lets you create a cross-platform mobile solution once and deploy it in seconds to all mobile users in the enterprise, who may run it on iPhones, iPads, Android phones or tablets, Windows Phones, Surface tablets, or even laptop or desktop computers.

And these are not simple .html-based one-size-fits-all Web pages, but true native mobile solutions that take advantage of all the rich interface features users already know, delivering mission-critical data from databases, XML files, or by issuing HTTP requests to remote servers and filtering and formatting the response as necessary.

The MobileTogether Designer is an easy-to-use development tool for creating high-quality business intelligence dashboards, interactive reports, enterprise forms, and other mobile applications by using drag-and-drop functionality. You simply drag various controls into the work area and assign data structures and actions to build a cross-platform solution.

Learn About XQuery Update Facility

New in XMLSpy Version 2015 is an innovative implementation of XQuery Update Facility. XQuery Update Facility is an extension of the XQuery language that allows you to make changes in an XML instance using “update expressions” that insert, delete, replace, or rename nodes.

XMLSpy supports both XQuery Update 1.0 and 3.0, which you can select in the XPath/XQuery window.

What makes the XMLSpy implementation so innovative? According to the standard, that the result of an XQuery Update execution is a new XML file based on the original file and the specified modifications. This means that each execution completely reformats the document. XMLSpy lets you skip this intermediary step, because it allows you to make updates directly in the specified XML file(s) without having to create a new file. In this way, XMLSpy provides an intelligent mechanism for implementing XQuery Update via a familiar find-and-replace paradigm. However, because XQuery Update provides for sophisticated updates using the power of FLWOR statements, it overcomes the limitations of find-and-replace and lets you make complex, intelligent XML file modifications quickly and easily.

As you compose your XQuery Update statements, the real-time results pane lets you preview the results of the changes to the affected nodes. Once you’re ready to apply them, you can choose to execute the updates in the current file or across all open files, a folder, or an entire XMLSpy project – with a single click.

See how it all works in this brief video, which walks you quickly through editing XQuery Update expressions in XMLSpy and also serves as a quick tutorial about how XQuery update Facility works if you’re unfamiliar with the syntax.

XQuery Update Facility Editor in XMLSpy

 

Download XMLSpy to try this new functionality for yourself. Or, watch some more videos of features new in the latest version.