May/June 2005

The mforms rapid mobile application development suite from Integral Mobile Data now supports BlackBerry mobile terminals from RIM, and is due to support Symbian-based mobile phones later this year or early next year.

Hitherto mforms has targeted Windows-based platforms, including tablet PCs and others using Windows XP, and Pocket PCs and similar devices running under a derivative of Windows CE. That includes smart phones running under Windows Mobile.

According to director Philip Neame, Integral's development toolkit is "probably the only one of its kind in the world supporting the BlackBerry range." Historically, the BlackBerry has tended to focus on email and office applications, whereas mforms makes it possible to develop bespoke vertical applications quickly and integrate them with back-office systems.

Mforms allows developers to create applications interactively via a drag-androp PC interface, then port them to mobile devices, and it can intelligently format the display to suit the target device. It said to be particularly flexible in its ability to link with industry-standard databases via ODBC, and unusually it can read and write to multiple database in different formats at the same time.