"Hello world": form development basics

What you'll be learning:

  • How to set up your solution artifact folder.

  • How to write a very basic mobile form.

  • How to publish solution artifacts to the Mobilengine Development Cloud.

  • How to send a solution to mobile users through the Backoffice website.

  • How to submit data with a form.

  • How to access submitted data on the Backoffice website.

You're starting out on an epic journey with the Mobilengine dev environment - you'll be switching between client-side and server-side views even in this first few steps. You'll set up your solution artifact folder, write a form with a text box and a label, open and fill in the form on a mobile device, submit it to the Cloud, then view the submitted data on the Backoffice site.

A working mobile form requires three distinct steps from the developer:

  • Create a form in the Mobilengine form language, which is a domain-specific declarative language to describe user interface and behavior with controls and data binding.

  • Publish it to the Development Cloud using the Mobilengine Build Tool (mebt) that you can install following these steps.

  • Download the published form to the Mobilengine client application that is running on your iOS mobile device (see the installation instructions for more information).

This might sound like a mouthful, but this process will become second nature to you in no time.

You'll build upon these foundations in the next section, to make your forms a bit more complex.