Adrian Blakey gave an excellent talk yesterday at the IBM WebSphere Technical Exchange Conference in San Francisco. He talked about BirdDog, a wireless/pervasive emergency-room application that Kaiser developed using IBM and NetMesh technologies. Here are some of the highlights (paraphrased):

... in the third iteration of our project, we swapped our hack for a product: NetMesh ... big realization: sending contextual alerts, making the device "beep" with situational context solves the real use case ... what the doctors need is not just a web-browser pull application, but event-driven.

Using NetMesh enabled us to aggregate "always-on" information over 7 backend systems that is simply inspected by the user interface ... both browser and messaging client...

Methodology: 1) high-level information model, 2) write the probes, 3) add call backs when information changes, 4) reusable JSP tags inspect the model.

What we'd like to have is situational computing ... the pervasive device picks up the situation that the doctor is in and tells the doctor what they need to know ... a very different usage model from a traditional web application, but it makes much more business sense for our doctors...

We will try to incrementally build our BirdDog to the be doctor's pervasive helper ... will continue to partner with NetMesh for the productivity and innovation their products provide.

We are obviously very happy to have such a satisfied customer. It also illustrates clearly that the Situational Information Grid is a platform one level higher than today's typical software platforms, and is to be used in conjunction, not in competition, with what the customer has already.

The second version of the document titled "Requirements for a Scalable Mobility Architecture" has been posted at http://netmesh.org/papers/mobility-architecture/netmesh-mobility-architecture-requirements.pdf

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, including Adrian Blakey, Andrew McMeikan, Axel Peter Mustad, and Ihor Kuz.

After some work, the NetMesh Developer's Site is now on-line at netmesh.org. Its goal is to become the primary resource for 3rd-party, in-house and corporate developers building on top of the NetMesh Situational Information Grid.

Here is our first draft of a paper called "Requirements for a Scalable Mobility Architecture". As enterprises are now looking to pick certain mobile technologies as corporate standards, we thought we would jot down a list of the requirements for mobile software architectures that we've seen in the market, so we and everyone could share their insights.

Unlike some other documents we've seen, this is NOT supposed to be a list of requirements that magically discounts all requirements a particular vendor just does not happen to meet yet; we want this list to be honest. Because of that, we ask everyone who has an opinion — user, vendor, pundit — to provide us with feedback and to tell us what we are missing and what we got wrong.

And to make it even easier, we've published this draft and then later versions under a Creative Commons license, so you can disagree with us, or build on it easily on your own site.

Finally, we have obsoleted the name R-Objects and we are now doing business as NetMesh only. The old website at www.r-objects.com has been migrated and updated; the new site is at netmesh.us.