PMF Components

Overview

Persistent Mobile Foundation consists of the following components: PMF CLI, PMF, client-side runtime components, PMF Operations Console, PMF Application Center, and the PMF Analytics component.

The following figure shows the components of PMF:

Architecture of the PMF solution

PMF CLI

You can use the Persistent Mobile Foundation Command Line Interface (CLI) to develop and manage applications, in addition to using the Persistent PMF Operations Console. Some aspects of the PMF development process must be done with the CLI.

The commands, all prefaced with pmfdev, support the following types of tasks:

  • Registering apps with the PMF
  • Configuring your app
  • Creating, building, and deploying adapters
  • Previewing and updating Cordova apps

PMF

The Persistent Mobile Foundation provides secured backend connectivity, application management, push notification support and analytics capabilities and monitoring to PMF applications. It is not an application server in the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) sense. It acts as a container for PMF application packages, and is in fact a collection of web applications, optionally packaged as an EAR (enterprise archive) file that run on top of traditional application servers.

PMF integrates into your enterprise environment and uses existing resources and infrastructure. This integration is based on adapters that are server-side software components responsible for channeling back-end enterprise systems and cloud-based services to the user device. You can use adapters to retrieve and update data from information sources, and to allow users to perform transactions and start other services and applications.

Client-side runtime components

PMF provides client-side runtime code that embeds server functionality within the target environment of deployed apps. These runtime client APIs are libraries that are integrated into the locally stored app code. You use them to add PMF features to your client apps. The APIs and libraries can be installed with the Persistent Mobile Foundation Developer Kit or you can download them from repositories for your development platform.

PMF Operations Console

The PMF Operations Console is used for the control and management of the mobile applications. The PMF Operations Console is also an entry point to learn about PMF development. From the console, you can download code examples, tools, and SDKs.

You can use the PMF Operations Console for the following tasks:

  • Monitor and configure all deployed applications, adapters, and push notification rules from a centralized, web-based console.
  • Remotely disable the ability to connect to PMF by using preconfigured rules of app version and device type.
  • Customize messages that are sent to users on application launch.
  • Collect user statistics from all running applications.
  • Generate built-in, pre-configured reports about user adoption and usage (number and frequency of users that are engaging with the server through the applications).
  • Configure data collection rules for application-specific events.

PMF Analytics

PMF includes a scalable operational Analytics feature that is accessible from the PMF Operations Console. The PMF Analytics feature enables enterprises to search across logs and events that are collected from devices, apps, and servers for patterns, problems, and platform usage statistics.

The data for Persistent Mobile Foundation Analytics includes the following sources:

  • Crash events of an application on iOS and Android devices (crash events for native code and JavaScript errors).
  • Interactions of any application-to-server activity (anything that is supported by the Client/server protocol, including push notification).
  • Server-side logs that are captured in traditional PMF log files.

PMF Analytics Receiver

PMF includes an optional feature Analytics Receiver. The PMF Analytics Receiver feature receives logs from mobile applications and send them to PMF Analytics in a phased manner. PMF Analytics Receiver maintains an in-memory queue to store the logs before sending them to Analytics. It alleviates major work done by PMF via loguploader api and reduces the usage of the in-memory queue usage. In the absence of this service the PMF will perform the log receiver and log forwarder functionality. PMF Analytics Receiver an optional service.

PMF Application Center

With the PMF Application Center, you can share mobile applications that are under development within your organization in a single repository of mobile applications. Development team members can use the PMF Application Center to share applications with members of the team. This process facilitates collaboration between all the people who are involved in the development of an application.

Your company can typically use the PMF Application Center as follows:

  1. The development team creates a version of an application.
  2. The development team uploads the application to the PMF Application Center, enters its description, and asks the extended team to review and test it.
  3. When the new version of the application is available, a tester runs the PMF Application Center installer application, which is the mobile client. Then, the tester locates this new version of the application, installs it on their mobile device, and tests it.
  4. After the tests, the tester rates the application and submits feedback, which is visible to the developer from the PMF Application Center console.

The PMF Application Center is aimed for private use within a company, and you can target some mobile applications to specific groups of users. You can use the PMF Application Center as an enterprise application store.

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