ODBC Arrives for Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

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US-based enterprise software developer August Software today released its much anticipated Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC) Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch extending Apple's iOS platform with industry standard database APIs.

ODBCrouter.com, September 22, 2010 (PressReleasePoint) -- August Software has released its much anticipated Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC) Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch extending the Apple iOS platform with industry standard database APIs. The new ODBC SDK for Apple iOS affords apps on Apple mobile devices a superset of the JDBC functionality present in Google's Android platform to connect live with enterprise data sources on Windows, Linux, IBM iSeries or AS/400, Unix, NetWare, DOS and legacy mainframes with support for most revisions of MySQL, 4D, QuickBooks Pro, DB/2, MYOB, Empress, Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access, Excel, Navision, Firebird, Pervasive, Sybase, Pick, Universe, Informix, Ingres and SQLite among many others. Available now, the new ODBC SDK for Apple iOS is part of the new iPhone-compatible editions of August Software’s server-based ODBC driver solution ODBC Router. In contrast to the relatively high cost of developing and maintaining a necessarily less efficient "mobile app web service", August Software's new ODBC Router iPhone Edition supporting an unrestricted number of concurrent database sessions from iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch as well as Mac, Linux and Windows is available starting at under $1,200 complete with additional instant discounts for non-profit organizations and institutions of public health or education.

Screenshots ( http://ODBCrouter.com/ipad )

Product Technical Details

ODBC SDK for Apple iOS consists of ARM and i386 format XCode libraries, “open source” ODBC header-files and an extensible multi-threaded Objective C class for incorporation and redistribution with any iOS 3.1.2 or later App on iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch or the simulator environment, as well as the complete project source for “odbcApp”, a sample iPhone App written by August Software to demonstrate the use of industry standard ODBC database APIs in Apple’s unique Cocoa Touch environment. ODBC SDK for Apple iOS is recommended for use by developers taking advantage of the free enterprise-grade VPN and WiFi security features included in Apple’s mobile devices, or by apps that otherwise login to their data sources using device tokens and do not require mobile data encryption (e.g., “games”, “social boards”, etc.) The runtime components of ODBC SDK for Apple iOS are provided royalty- free for redistribution with retail or enterprise database Apps and add approximately 563K to the footprint of those apps.

Analysis: Web Services vs. ODBC

Through the use of the new ODBC SDK for Apple iOS, mobile apps may now directly interact with their network data source simply by passing standard SQL queries and stored procedure invocations via industry standard ODBC programming calls that return binary data just they do on Windows, Mac and Linux, without maintaining an intervening high-overhead “web service”. Previous to this development, due in large part to iPhone’s web-oriented beginnings, App developers had traditionally hardcoded such network data source interactions in a variety of custom (not industry standard) formats to run against separately coded “web services”. These “web services”, really “mini websites” in their own right, were typically maintained in memory and CPU intensive “interpreted environments” such as Ruby or PHP, detracting from the main focus of the mobile App development experience and requiring even small developers to cultivate often vast server-side infrastructures. The resulting concoction of intermingled client-side and server-side code has jeopardized application backwards compatibility while burdening networks and mobile CPUs with bandwidth inefficient, battery-draining non-binary data formats such as JSON and XML. Such issues developed in sharp contrast to Google’s Android platform that greatly benefitted from its Java underpinnings, including JDBC, the Java-based alternative to ODBC. This is further demonstrated in practice through Apple’s selection of a highly efficient binary-interface to maintain reliability, backwards compatibility and scalability in its own Push Notification Services. Today’s ODBC SDK for Apple iOS release all but eliminates the need for such web services in most enterprise-grade and ad-hoc retail Apps.

Analysis: “Open” Database API

Significantly, elimination of web services and their high-overhead interpreted languages also removes the incentive those environments provided to lock Apps into specific revisions of certain databases by hard-coding to their integrated proprietary programming interfaces, such as those of MySQL which faces a “new future” (along side Java itself) under “new ownership” by its largest for-profit competitor. Instead, through the use of “Open” Data Base Connectivity programming interfaces, the user’s preferred database system (be it MySQL, Oracle, Access, SQLServer, DB/2 or more) may not necessarily even be known ahead of time by the App developer and is typically only selected during deployment,much like a printer, and easily changed without source code modifications through the simple ODBC control panel installed on the ODBC network’s centralized Windows PC (or VM).

About ODBC Router

ODBC Router is software that leverages a standard Microsoft Windows instance on a customer’s network as an “appliance” for routing ODBC database sessions originating from networks of iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Macintosh, Linux and Windows, thereby eliminating the need to install database-specific drivers on every machine in a customer’s network or resorting to poorly supported non-Windows ODBC drivers, proprietary database programming interfaces, virtual machines or inefficient and difficult to maintain JSON and XML marshalling strategies. First delivered in the mid-1990s in support of Macintosh, ODBC Router is now in use around the globe by Fortune 100 companies, governments and startups alike across Macs, Linux, Windows and Apple mobile devices.

About August Software

Celebrating 20 years of enterprise software innovation, privately held, US-based, August Software was founded by senior personnel from the world’s second largest computer company who are credited with developing the world’s first modern client/server system, tying millions of dollars worth of Macs into SQL databases in support of a diverse range of applications ranging from healthcare IT to the first international space station.
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ODBC Router and August Software are trademarks of AugSoft LLC. All other product and/or technology names, including Apple, IBM and Oracle, are the intellectual property or marks of their respective holders and are used for their benefit and without intent to infringe.