1. Building &
Managing
Mobile
Solutions
A Whitepaper
Mfuse Limited

2. Copyright © October 2012, Mfuse Limited Page 1
Contents
Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 2
The Challenges in Effectively Developing and Managing Mobile Solutions .................... 3
1. Performance........................................................................................................ 4
2. Security ................................................................................................................ 5
3. High Traffic Levels............................................................................................. 6
4. Handset & OS Variety....................................................................................... 7
5. Complex Back-Office Systems......................................................................... 7
6. Internationalisation, Localisation & Personalisation................................... 8
7. Mission-Critical Services................................................................................... 8
8. Cost-Efficiency.................................................................................................... 9
The Mfuse Approach.................................................................................................................. 10
Design, Development & Testing ............................................................................. 10
Security......................................................................................................................... 10
Scalability ..................................................................................................................... 11
The Mfuse Platform ................................................................................................... 11
Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 12

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Executive Summary
The mobile application industry has evolved at a breath-taking pace in the past decade.
Protocols and platforms designed for low-capability handsets on low-bandwidth networks
(Java ME, WAP, WML, etc.) were made obsolete by rapid advances in devices, operator
networks and software platforms. Today’s mobile technologies include mobile-optimised
websites and web-apps built with HTML5, OS-specific native application platforms and, in
the middle, a variety of hybrid platforms that aim towards the ‘write-once access-
anywhere’ ideal. Whichever technology is chosen, rich, powerful, engaging sites and apps
are not only possible now, but are considered the norm.
Whilst the options and possibilities have grown, the challenges for businesses and system
architects remain much as they have always been. Namely how to capitalise on this
potential in a secure, scalable, cost-effective manner whilst maintaining an edge over the
competition and providing users with the experience and functionality they expect.
Mfuse was originally established in 2002 to fill a gap in the market and to provide clients
not just with mobile applications that go beyond the norm, but also with the highest
levels of scalability, security, transaction management, back-office and API integration, and
service management that are demanded by leading enterprise and B2C businesses.
Since then, Mfuse has grown with the industry. It has seen the coming and going of
technologies such as WAP, Java ME and, through continuous investment in R&D, user
experience and via close-collaboration with its clients, has remained on the cutting edge
of the mobile and tablet application space. As a result, the Mfuse Mobile Application
Development Platform (MADP) that is used by our teams internally has developed with
our business to where it is today - providing enterprise-level services and device-aware
rendering across the spectrum of mobile and tablet devices that are found in both
developed and developing territories.
In this whitepaper we examine the challenges in more detail and also discuss the
approach taken by the Mfuse offering and its Mobile Application Development
Platform to tackle them.

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The Challenges in Effectively Developing and Managing Mobile
Solutions
Mfuse specialises in both mobile application development and also in understanding the
broader requirements for the development and management of enterprise-level and
large-scale B2C systems. The issues that need to be overcome are familiar to anyone with
experience designing, building or managing systems of this scale - regardless of the type
of device used to access them:
1. Performance: Providing users with the performance they expect from their site
or app.
2. Security: Providing users with the security they deserve.
3. High-Traffic Levels: Scaling systems to cope with high levels of concurrent
traffic, both as the norm and during extreme peaks around significant events.
4. Handset & OS Variety: Giving users with the most capable devices the best
possible experience, whilst still supporting those with less able devices (or lower
bandwidth networks at that point in time).
5. Complex Back Office Systems: Integrating with complex (and often remote)
back-office systems in a transactional and performant manner.
6. Internationalisation, Localisation and Personalisation: Efficient support for
internationalisation, localisation, personalisation, etc.
7. Mission-critical Services: Hosting and managing high-volume mission-critical
services.
8. Cost-Efficiency: How to do all of the above in a cost-effective manner.
Whilst these are all typical problems in the development and management of any large-
scale system, those systems that support users with primarily mobile or tablet devices
have specialised requirements (and solutions) in all of these areas.
The lessons that Mfuse has learnt, the Mobile Application Development Platform
(MADP) that it has built and evolved, and the processes it has put in place in the last
decade put Mfuse in a unique position to be able to understand and effectively solve
these issues.

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1. Providing users with the performance they expect from their site or app.
Today’s users expect fast loading times, responsive applications and dynamic information
at their fingertips. This can be difficult to achieve at the best of times, once outside the
controlled conditions of a campus or enterprise. On high-latency, low-bandwidth mobile
networks it becomes a true challenge, especially if users are contending for bandwidth in
a congested cell (e.g. at a concert or football match).
All areas of the architecture require attention in order to achieve the speeds necessary to
give users the performance they are accustomed to. Applications must be efficient,
communication protocols must be light and highly optimised and data must be
manipulated and cached at numerous points to ensure it is as close as possible to the
users, whilst balancing this with the need to always keep it current and accurate.
The applications Mfuse typically builds for its clients need to solve all these problems
two-fold, i.e. in terms of (i) the server application, the application running on the user’s
device and the communications between the two, and (ii) the server application and the
manner in which it communicates with clients’ back-office systems and third-party feeds.
To meet the challenges of application execution on a user’s device, it is critical to
understand the wide range of capabilities that are out there. Application logic and
richness of functionality must be tailored to the device in question with full support for
the latest smartphones and a graceful degradation in functionality as the capabilities
decrease. Expecting an app (or mobile-optimised website) that doesn’t tailor itself in this
manner to equally please an iPhone 5 user, the user of a two-year old HTC and the user
of a four year old BlackBerry is unrealistic.
Data transmission between the application and user’s device must be kept to an absolute
minimum and be heavily optimised in order to achieve satisfactory performance across a
mobile network. Assets should be cached where supported by the handset, though the
caching support declared by the OS manufacturer is not always stable or complete, which

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can result in obsolete imagery and even logic (e.g. JavaScript) being cached beyond its
use-by-date and potentially causing incompatibilities with the server application.
Different devices provide varying levels of support for both HTTP Header-based caching
and HTML5 Local Storage-based caching and a strategy that caters for both methods
(and the varying levels of compatibility across Operating Systems within each method) is
required for an optimised approach covering all users. Highly dynamic or volatile data
needs handling more carefully and is best cached where there is more control, including
in the server application, in the network appliances and perhaps in the client application
(e.g. natively or using HTML5 Local Storage).
The same rules apply when integrating with other feeds for data, e.g. third-party news
and content, live video-streams, etc. Data and content often requires careful aggregation
and manipulation before it is consumed, especially where the APIs from which it is
sourced are not designed with the specific needs of the application in mind and therefore
often bear little if any resemblance to the application’s use cases.
2. Providing users with the security they deserve.
Thankfully, all of today’s major platforms support standard secured communication
protocols, such as HTTPS, and the days of designing custom protocols to work around the
deficiencies of, say, Java ME certificate management are behind us.
Nevertheless, data communication is just one aspect of security that needs to be
addressed. Security must be treated as a first-class requirement right the way through
the development and hosting/management processes and throughout the entire
architecture. System access must be locked down and audited, firewalls must be correctly
configured (and regularly exercised through penetration testing), patch management must
be well disciplined, multiple levels of physical security must be in place in the datacentre;
these and many related aspects of security are givens in today’s modern multiuser
systems.
Equally, as the exponential growth in ecommerce has driven online payments to the
forefront of security officers’ concerns, the relevant organisations have come together and
formed new processes and standards that must be adhered to (e.g. the PCI DSS1) by any
sizable business expecting to be able to responsibly manage card payments.
Security is something we must all be concerned about and treat seriously throughout the
entire architecture and all business processes.
1 See https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org

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3. Scaling systems to cope with high levels of concurrent traffic, both as the norm
and during extreme peaks around significant events.
Mfuse has seen mobile progress from a niche channel with relatively little traffic, to
becoming a dominant force that is driving technical and social change and gaining board-
level attention with even our biggest clients. Given the on-going increase in online
activity and that mobile Internet usage will soon overtake non-mobile access2, the need to
scale efficiently is paramount.
Mfuse now sees mobile traffic levels breaking previous records on an almost weekly basis
and approaching 25%-30% of all digital access within our clients. In addition, we see
huge spikes in traffic (with record numbers of user sessions and transactions) around live
events, recent examples in the sporting world being Grand National 20123 and the
European Football Championships4.
Coping with these demands requires:
• Technical expertise when designing and building solutions, e.g. around the
additional complexities of secure, high-volume session management and
distributed multi-tier data caching. Whilst these are often solved through the use
of third-party technologies built for these purposes, they rarely work out-of-the-
box for high-volume situations and never take the specifics of mobile
environments into account.
• Creativity and agility when hosting and managing these services.
Mfuse has long understood the need to build support for all these issues and more into
its MADP and has continuously updated and enhanced it over the years to keep it current
and best-of-breed. The Technical Services team is second to none when it comes to
understanding how to cater for high-load situations for the clients that ask us to host and
manage their mobile services. It also has a wealth of experience going beyond the usual
online service management (in itself not to be underestimated) and into the subtle
differences found with users that access the service via mobile cell gateways and operator
networks – rendering, for example, some of the more usual load-balancing techniques
ineffective.
2 This has been widely predicted for a number of years to happen around 2013/14 (e.g. see
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413) and the trend towards this is certainly being
borne out by our clients.
3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_National
4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_2012

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4. Giving users with the most capable devices the best possible experience, whilst
still supporting those with less able devices (or lower bandwidth networks at that
point in time).
While cross-browser incompatibilities have made this a concern for web designers since
the early days of the WWW, it has greater significance in the mobile domain where the
overall variation in capabilities is much larger, not just amongst smartphones, but also
across feature phones - for those wishing to have a broader reach across demographics
or territories.
Most of Mfuse’s clients require applications that support not just the latest version of
Apple iOS and Android and that take advantage of their full capabilities, but also provide
a gracefully degrading service right down to feature phones that don’t even have dynamic
functionality capability (e.g. JavaScript support).
For these reasons, the mobile ‘channel’ needs to be considered as multiple channels with
each divided into sub-channels providing a grouping across similar device families and a
product offering that spans them all. Beyond this (and also driving the routing between
channels and sub-channels), an intimate knowledge of the device making a request is
required, including details of handset, operating system and version, screen-size and
various capabilities including ability to support JavaScript, CSS 3 / WebKit extensions and
so on.
In a similar vein, there is little point trying to serve a data-rich and highly-dynamic,
bandwidth-intensive service to a smartphone user with a poor signal reception or in a
high-contention area, as the chances of it reaching the device or performing well are
remote. Hence, it is important to recognise such scenarios and gracefully downgrade
(automatically and/or at the user’s request) through the service quality levels. Enabling
this switching is critical (as is, of course, providing multiple QoS levels in the first place).
5. Integrating with complex (and often remote) back-office systems in a
transactional and performant manner.
In many respects, this has little to do specifically with mobile, although it is worth
pointing out that the skills required to build mobile applications are often very different
to those for building complex back-end systems, especially those that integrate tightly
into others, so it is key to ensure you (or your supplier) have capabilities in both areas if
integration requirements are anticipated.
One particular area in which we have learnt that mobile affects this is where integrating
into back-office APIs built for other purposes or channels. A common requirement is to

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integrate with an API designed to support an existing website. A mobile product’s design
and user journeys will be very different to those of a traditional website or desktop
application, due to the differences in screen size and interaction conventions. A single
page on a website often translates into a number of smaller broken-down pages in a
mobile application.
Conversely, it is not uncommon to find a single page in a mobile application aggregating
information and interaction that might be found spread across a number of pages in a
traditional website, in order to reduce the number of clicks (and server interactions across
a mobile network) to achieve some given goal.
The result is often that APIs that serve websites perfectly well are far from ideal when
looked at from the perspective of a mobile product and rarely have operations that map
neatly to the application’s use cases. Hence, particular skills and experience are beneficial
to be able to aggregate and cache effectively in order to decouple the mobile product
from the back-office API. Support for this within the chosen MADP is invaluable.
6. Efficient support for internationalisation, localisation, personalisation, etc.
Again, these are not necessarily issues that are specific to mobile, but they certainly have
an added emphasis when dealing with a mobile product and the possibilities they bring,
for example through location-awareness.
Again, support within the MADP for such concerns is essential.
7. Hosting and managing high-volume mission-critical services.
This subject overlaps everything that has been discussed above. For a high-volume
system to be hosted and managed effectively, it needs to have been designed with
security, scalability and ease of configuration and internationalisation in mind from the
start.
However, it also requires a deep understanding of the underlying infrastructure
requirements and the specifics of the mobile space. In high-profile transactional sites, we

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find DDOS attacks are common, outages at independent nodes in a network path
between a distributed application and back-office occur more often than we would like
(and never at a civilised time of day), patch and configuration management require high
levels of discipline and a constant increase in demand and throughput a fact of life.
Some of these require no knowledge of mobile. Others would have left Mfuse
floundering were it not for a highly skilled team and a far-reaching knowledge of the
mobile space.
8. How to do all of the above in a cost-effective manner.
There is, of course, no silver bullet! Building and managing Internet-scale mobile services
for enterprise or B2C consumption requires skill and experience across a wide range of
disciplines.
Many MADPs are now available to help with the building of such services and Mfuse
indeed has its own that it has honed over many years. However, the selection and use of
a MADP will not in itself bring success; skill and experience in the field and disciplines
related to mobile development are crucial.
Mfuse has a solid track record in solving these problems and the approach taken is
discussed in the following section.

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The Mfuse Approach
The Mfuse approach consists of a thoroughly modern development methodology, a
MADP developed and refined over a decade to support our applications and a
philosophy that puts the client’s needs at the forefront and utilises a wealth of
mobile expertise to fulfil them.
Design, Development and Testing
Mfuse takes a modern approach to development and tailors its processes to clients’
specific needs wherever necessary. Product Definition and User Experience workshops
usually kick the process off, followed by rapid prototyping and plenty of opportunity for
early feedback.
We have a strong team of business analysts, user experience and design experts with a
wealth of mobile experience that are committed to producing the best applications
available.
Development itself uses agile methodologies that are tailored to our specific
requirements, though we can accommodate particular clients’ needs, e.g. working
collaboratively with a strictly Scrum methodology with one of our clients. Again,
prototyping is used heavily, alongside Test Driven Development5 practises and iterative
development, always with the aim of delivering often and getting early feedback.
Our QA team are engaged from the start and Continuous Integration and Delivery6
techniques are applied throughout. We place great emphasis on testability and rigorous
quality control is paramount.
We are a software development company at heart and all these things matter to us. We
develop systems as we feel they should be developed and believe that sound practises
and modern processes are critical in the delivery of today’s software solutions, mobile or
not.
Security
The security of our clients and their end users is at the heart of everything we do. Our
early adoption of PCI is an illustration of this; around 2004/2005 the major credit card
5 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development
6 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery

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companies aligned their individual security and fraud prevention programmes and
released the PCI DSS1. Mfuse has been committed to PCI since the beginning and it,
along with all aspects of data- and physical-security, underpins all our systems and
processes.
Scalability
Due in part to our expertise and also our cost-effectiveness, most of our clients ask us to
host and manage their mobile and tablet services for them, including the very large that
have significant hosting capability of their own. These have been long-term arrangements
and continue to be so and this is testament to our abilities to provide secure and scalable
services for serious, large-scale B2C sites and web-apps.
We employ a redundant and highly dynamic virtualised environment that enables us to
respond quickly both to failure modes and user demands and we anticipate moving
further into Cloud-based environments, for those clients that would be compatible, in
2013.
The Mfuse Platform
Mfuse’s Mobile Application Development Platform started life as a small collection of
tools and utility classes and, over the following decade, has evolved into a full-fledged
and mature platform that solves all of the problems we encounter when developing large
scale mobile solutions. This provides the foundations for everything we do, whilst
continually evolving to support the changes in mobile and server-side technologies and
incorporating best-of-breed open frameworks.

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Conclusion
There are a number of approaches that can be taken to overcome the challenges
presented when developing large, enterprise or B2C mobile applications and websites.
The approach that Mfuse takes has been honed, tried and tested over the last decade and
enables us to provide our clients with industry-leading applications.
While many of the challenges will in principle be familiar to developers, architects and IT
managers outside of the mobile space, the specifics of the mobile space and the solutions
it requires can pose problems - especially around the areas of pan-handset support. It is
ironic that whilst everybody has long predicted convergence of mobile technologies, the
reality is continued divergence, especially when you get into the detail. We expect this
trend to continue for some time before the industry standardises across OSs and
platforms. In the meantime, the need for specialist solutions to specialist needs within the
mobile industry will persist.
Mfuse are more than happy to discuss these problems and their solutions in further
detail. Please do contact us for more information:
Mfuse Limited www: www.mfuse.com
3rd
Floor, Mitre House tel: +44 (0)20 7154 2070
177 Regent Street email: info@mfuse.com
London W1B 4JN