H. Heising – Utrecht, the Netherlands. In the desktop computing world there are different flavors of technology such as OS X, Windows, Linux or Unix. If you purchase an application you know you can use it for the next 5 to 10 years. The current trend is cloud computing. An increasing number of developers are moving away from developing for proprietary operating systems to developing for browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari and let’s not forget about Google’s Chrome, which was built and optimized for the cloud.
But now about mobile technology?
Mobile devices however, are on a different path. They all have different operating systems. BlackBerry OS is completely different from iPhone OS, Android and Windows Mobile. Symbian even comes with 3 different development platforms. And Windows is not simply Windows. Keeping up with all the iterations will give you a migraine; Windows CE, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Standard, Windows Mobile Professional, Windows XP, Vista. One person might want to have an all-in-one device for calls, e-mail and to have integrated with their corporate network and applications. Another person might have a normal phone to make his phone calls and uses a tablet PC with a big screen to update forms and read mail. Preferably a mobile application supports all of them, but in practice this would mean you have to develop 2 or 3 applications.
With the current standardization of mobile technology and with the current lifecycle of mobile devices it is all but certain that your mobile application will never be finished. This is one of the hazards of developing proprietary applications for mobile devices. You will have to re-develop your mobile application as soon as it ready to support newer devices and OS’s
Best practices include leveraging mobile middleware that supports all the main mobile operating systems. It should behave as a generic gateway that provides the capability to integrate to multiple back end applications on one side and a variety of mobile devices on the other. There are solutions on the market today that can tremendously simply your mobilization efforts and allow your development efforts to be spent on your organizations core competencies.
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