Kony' Reference Architecture? What is it?
The term “Reference Architecture”, within the Information Technology community, has various meanings, multiple purposes and uses, varying levels of detail and abstraction. When referring to Kony Reference Architecture this means that a schema or infinite set of programmable software components that will enables the developer to build apps with less effort that can be deployed across supported mobile hardware. The end result can speed up the development effort quicker than coding them by hand.
Kony Reference Architecture provides a set of components and tools produced by Kony, Inc. enabling the development team to build apps in a highly modular manner.
Currently as it stands the industry-standard Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern is utilised for the created mobile apps. Under the MVC architecture, the model stores, encapsulates, and performs operations on data. The view presents data to the user that it obtains from the model. The controller receives commands from the user and tells the model to update its data or updates the view.
App Development and Kony' Reference Architecture
When it comes to mobile app development using the conceived Kony Reference Architecture, this differs slightly from the traditional JavaScript app development in that it is much more structured with lower granularity integration points.
With the traditional JavaScript app the variables, functions, methods are declared globally and can be accessed from anywhere in the program. Apps developed with Kony Reference Architecture, on the other hand, are more highly structured even though they are still written in JavaScript. As a result, we are able to define a more organised approach towards development of these functions, methods which in turn resulting in a highly reusable code modules that can be utilised in any perceived Kony based mobile apps.
The following diagram shows the difference between traditional development and development using Kony Reference Architecture.
fig 1. Kony reference architecture vs traditional Javascript
Kony Reference Architecture Implementation of MVC
With the Kony platform the views as UI forms that contain one or more widgets. They do not have information about where the data is stored, what format it's stored in, or how to perform operations on it.
Therefore the views are built by creating the user interface in Kony Visualizer using forms and widgets from the standard set of Kony Widgets. Note that views can also be templates or masters.
Masters provide the capability to define user interface elements and action sequences in a single definition, and then instantiate them anywhere throughout an application. A master may be nested within other masters, or within forms. Additionally, masters can be built once and then instanced for mobile, tablet, and desktop, as illustrated in the following diagram.
fig 2. Kony Masters - relationship between forms
The model in Kony Reference Architecture encapsulates the app's data and no other component in the app needs information about where the data is stored and what format it is stored in. As a result, an app's data can be local to the app or it can be stored remotely on a server and accessed via http.
Kony Reference Architecture will enable the access to data from many sources, and it's especially easy to do so if you use the Kony Fabric on the server side.
The controller in Kony Reference Architecture encapsulates the business logic of the app. It also takes responsibility for communication between the model and the view. It responds to user input sent to it by the view. In addition, it retrieves, updates, and stores data using the model.
fig 3. Kony Visualiser
In essence why use the Kony Reference Architecture:
Why you should use Kony Reference Architecture SDK?
The purposes of the Kony Reference Architecture SDK are as follows.
- Ease of Use
- Developer Productivity
- Code Separation and Reuse
- Designers, Developers, and Testers can Work Together
- Getting Started Easily
- Parallel Development
- Faster App Development
- ORM Capabilities
Thanks for reading:
E.Ramos
Mobile Technology Professional