InterSystems Introduces Zen Mojo for Enterprise Mobile Web App Development

InterSystems has announced Zen Mojo, a new technology for the development of Web-based apps for mobile and desktop environments. 

According to InterSystems, Zen Mojo was designed take advantage of the functionality and responsive user interfaces of mobile devices, when creating data-rich, enterprise-class Web apps. The open source plugin framework allows adoption of new and evolving client libraries.

The Zen Mojo framework leverages JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and is embedded in InterSystems Caché, a fast and scalable database to facilitate big data applications.

Zen Mojo applications are Single-Page Applications (SPA), an approach that reduces back-and-forth communication with the server. Instead of generating HTML that is shipped from server to client, the server transmits metadata necessary for the client to render new content. This metadata drives the layout of the page and includes all the display data as well. The result are engaging UIs with full access to enterprise data from any device.

The Single Page Architecture is an efficient for reducing client-server communication. The page consists of a rather small amount of HTML skeleton code and can update its content with metadata transmitted by a server. By changing the underlying metadata, the page can change the currently displayed data or even transition to a new display page – without actually moving to a new physical page. Zen Mojo uses JSON (an efficient raw data format) for communication, so the SPA minimizes the payload between client and server, and ensures optimized control by the developer.

Zen Mojo uses a plugin interface for integration of the JavaScript user interface (UI) libraries, like jQuery Mobile or the Dojo Toolkit. This approach enables developers to select new client functionality for Zen Mojo as soon as it arises. The technology can also be used with frameworks such as PhoneGap for quickly building cross-platform mobile apps.