MEX and Ideablade

Australia’s most trusted CMMS solution uses DevForce to get their application to their customers—no matter what the client technology.

MEX’s business spans dozens of industries and thousands of users. In order to reach them all, MEX has developed products that can work on the desktop, the web, phones, and other mobile devices. MEX currently runs on all of the following client platforms: ASP.NET, Microsoft Access, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, and WinForms, and now iOS on the iPad.

You’d think MEX would need a small army of developers to code for so many clients, but they did it all with four developers … and DevForce.

Matthew Calcutt, Products Manager at MEX, explains,

“All the time we invested into server-side coding we wanted to be re-usable in the future with any front-end. DevForce allowed us to upgrade our current business object layer and create a re-useable data layer for basically any client platform needed.

Without DevForce, we would have had to do a lot of data calculating at the database level in views/stored procedures or else client-side (which doesn’t lend itself to re-usability). Using DevForce’s custom properties, all the labor is done server-side, which is normally the more powerful side, and keeps the client-side simple and adds to re-usability.

The DevForce OData API side of things really came into its own and ensured that all client requests flowed through the same server-side security, validation, and other business logic as our .NET clients. We took advantage of this to transmit business objects—extended by our own custom properties—rather than have to deal with raw database data.”

By building their infrastructure with DevForce, MEX was able to reuse their client-side code with multiple front-end clients, so no matter what platform their customers want to use in the future, be it iOS, Silverlight, or HTML/JS, they'll be ready.

Read the full article and learn how Matthew and the team used DevForce to put MEX on the iPad.

Protect your business from costly rewrites in today’s rapidly changing world. Download DevForce Universal 2010, get the infrastructure right, and drive multiple client UI technologies.

Have questions? Contact us and we’ll be happy to help. Call 510.596.5100 or email sales@ideablade.com