Development of a Rendering Server for Enterprise-Grade Dynamic Websites

Abstract: Openratio offers a mobile platform as a service (mPaaS) to build secure enterprise apps that use legacy systems from vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and SAP. The platform creates native mobile applications and mobile websites using a simple drag and drop interface without writing code. Openratio continuously develops their platform in short design cycles, and started a major system upgrade in 2014. The old mobile website was incompatible with the new specifications and upgrading it was time intensive, leading to a 6 months delay behind other system components’ progress. This thesis covers the process of analyzing the previous mobile website server and implementing a new mobile website rendering server. The server is developed from scratch using node.js, a javascript platform for developing web applications, and jQuery mobile, an HTML 5 based interface for responsive mobile websites. The designed server uses real-time configuration settings to dynamically render each page’s layout, navigation and content with enterprise-grade security. In addition, the server handles user authentication and session management, content fetching from external data sources and uses styling and website templating engines. The new implemented server shortened the updating time for each development cycle and decoupling the mobile website rendering server from the main server allowed team members to work on several platform components in parallel.