What sort of programming environment is the Pyxis/Verivo Mobile system?

Question

I just heard that a company I do work for may be bringing in the Pyxis Mobile application development system. When I google it most of what I find is from the company's web site and that is not very informative from a geek perspective. Can any one shed some light on what sort of programming environment it is and what programing language is involved (please let there be a text based language). Any additional information would be great.

Note: the company/product changed their name to Verivo in January.

Answer 1

I just got note about the most recent comments. I don't want to turn this into a thread of back and forth, but did want to throw a couple of quick notes.

Regarding the points on version control and documentation/developer community - no big contest there. We are definitely working on these shortcommings. We have some basic pieces in place, but we have big plans to focus on this.

Regarding unit testing - we provide a very open interface to our middleware and backend components and they can be very easily unit tested with a bit of instrumentation. We run a ton of unit and integration tests internally. However, mobile unit testing is extremely difficult to get right. We'll investigate this further.

Regarding #4 around middleware and offline capabilities - things are a lot different now. With version 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 our products have increasing become more capabale offline and now features a secure local database if necessary. I can provide more details as necessary, but you can certainly login and operate the app even if you are out of coverage for weeks at a time!

Regarding #5, we've had a scripting engine for over 2 years. Its Lua based and its actually quite powerful and fast. It was BlackBerry only till the most recent release. Given Apple's change of stance on allowing scripting we now allow scripting on BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone and Android as well now!

@RockMeetHardplace - feel free to reach out to me directly and I'll be happy to give you more detailed live demos of our latest platform. I am at - arunSPAMNOTatpyxismobiledotcom (drop the "SPAMNOT" and replace the at and dot). I happen to be the Director of Software and interested in knowing more about the issues you had.

Answer 2

Beware of Pyxis Mobile. While many of the things they say do work, there are some serious platform issues (as a geek) which I've experienced.

1) No version control system process. The Application studio can basically only be developed on by one person at a time or you risk having your changes overwritten by a fellow developer. The "principle of last save" is very much in play.

2) No unit test coverage. This isn't the biggest issue for a lot of people, but it's a concern for anyone who wants to work in the Enterprise world.

3) The middleware server gets you some value, but it's also a PITA to work with. There is no concept of "client side storage" unless you consider the middleware server the client side. If your phone goes out of coverage, your app won't work. Again, this might not be an issue for you.

4) The application has no true scripting language to work with. The middleware server allows you to intercept requests and responses and modify what you're doing there, but it's not the most elegant solution considering that a native application can have something as simple as "if this then X else Y." This can be accomplished with Pyxis, but the whole process is convoluted and more complicated than one would think it needs to be.

5) Lack of documentation. There's some training guides and the GUI is easy enough to get around for simple apps; however, when you need to do something with guts, you're left relying on Pyxis professional services. There's really no developer community to pose questions to.

I have more complaints, but they are more opinion oriented than Q/A oriented.