The example is focused on a simple company employee directory. The data follows the following schema: last name, first name, phone number, ID.
This sample application will provide the following functionality:
View a list of all employees
View and update an employee's information
Add a new employee
Although you could create this simple application using offline web pages, in doing so, you would encounter a few limitations. First, in order to display all of the application data, you would need to create three basic pages:
A list page that displays all the employees names
An update and detail page for each employee
An add new user page
Another thing to consider is that because the server generates the update/detail pages, you will synchronize 102 web pages to the device if you have 100 employee records in the directory. In addition, because the update/detail pages are generated by the server, none of the changes made to the update/detail page are be reflected in the list page until the changes have been synchronized with the server.
Although the same application created using DHTML and the M-Business XML conduit contains the same basic HTML pages listed above, you will implement them differently.
When using the M-Business XML conduit you will generate three types of files from the web application server:
HTML pages that will access and format the data on the device.
XSD pages used by the M-Business XML conduit to process the XML file that contains the application data. This is the schema definition of the XML data.
XML pages that contain the data that is synchronized down to the device by the M-Business XML conduit and M-Business Server. There is a one-to-one relationship between XSD schema pages and XML pages.