Piloting a mobile-app ecosystem for smart farming

As interconnected mobile applications plow their way into every possible application domain, they often require offlineprocessing capabilities. Susanne Braun, Ralf Carbon, and Matthias Naab report from the field that architects and developers must challenge traditional data management assumptions when they're designing such mobile-app ecosystems. The authors designed a custom-solution architecture that balances conflicting quality attributes and harvested their architectural decisions on data replication and offline synchronization in the presence of unreliable network connectivity. We thank them for sharing this experience with us. - Cesare Pautasso and Olaf Zimmermann