The Contact App is a contact management application developed for Eurocommercial. This app originated out of our users' need to quickly look up different employees of Eurocommercial’s. At the same time the app managers would need to be able to easily edit or add to the existing contact information. We decided to create different Contact Groups consisting of multiple Contacts, each with their role within the group.
Because of the requirements of the app - quick and portable access - we decided to create a mobile app for it using the Ionic Framework. For the backend we decided to use Apache Isis since this allowed us to rapidly develop the required backend application and surface a REST API to which the mobile application could connect. We found that it worked together quite well, and with part of the team behind Estatio we were able to create an app that is clear to use and manage.
As our first Apache Isis app making use of mobile technologies it opens the doors for more to follow. Ionic has proven easy to learn and build apps with, and has a helpful community. Meanwhile we’ve used Apache Isis' support for JAXB view models and in particular the simplified REST representations introduced in v1.12.0. The result is code that is easy to follow and enhance.
We expect that the scope of Contact App will expand and new features added, these will (most likely) remain open source. Meanwhile we’re now set up nicely to build further mobile apps using this technology stack.