Mobility is expanding into all domains of the enterprise. It is becoming all pervasive in the users personal life too. With innumerable use cases, and wide range of applicability, smart devices have gone from being just a gadget to a lifestyle choice.
Mobility is expanding into all domains of the enterprise. It is becoming all pervasive in the users personal life too. With innumerable use cases,
and wide range of applicability, smart devices have gone from being just a gadget to a lifestyle choice. But come to think of it, the reason for this popularity is not the devices, because no one would really buy an expensive device if all it did was make calls. The main force driving this wave of adoption is the app ecosystem. When apple said “there’s an app for that”, the statement was partially true, but today is can be said with a lot more conviction.
This growth has made the users more demanding when it comes to the performance of their device or the software that resides on it.. This has put a lot of pressure on the developers who are responsible for the creation of these pieces of code, because they have to meet these requirements while dealing with many different challenges like the selection of the platform and the hardware, device fragmentation and other challenges. It is even more difficult to create applications for the enterprise because the requirements there are even more stringent.
A major factor that determines the success or failure of the application is the choice of the methodology of development. The developer need t take a call based on the target user base. The idea always native applications-meet their applications of those applications that I’ve created, and Dendron on, only the specific platform has been to cater to the largest amount of user population possible. Mobile application development offers four choices for the developer to choose from.
1. Native apps: Native apps are apps developed and installable for a certain mobile platform (e.g. IOS or Android). They are installed directly onto the device. Users typically acquire these apps through an online store or marketplace such as the Apple app store, or Google Play.
2. HTML5: HTML5 apps use standard web technologies—typically HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. This Write One, Run Many” solution requires you to write your code once, which can be run over different platforms.
3. Hybrid Apps: This the combination of a HTML5 and native app. Developers can embed HTML5 apps inside a thin native container, combining the best (and worst) elements of native and HTML5 apps.
4. Mobile Middleware: Here, the application is divided into 2 tiers - The interface and the presentation logic resides in the device itself, while the business logic sits in a remote back-end server. These development environments usually offer tools to develop both server side components and mobile applications. SDKs for different mobile platforms facilitate the communication with server side components. Apps can leverage third party tools to develop the UI and the navigation since mobile middleware tends to focus on integrating with existing back end systems and provides logic to serve relevant information to end users.
Of the four listed above, mobile middleware has some distinct advantages when it comes to agility, security, and ease of deployment. Middleware save the coding time required to build common server side components for multiple applications, as now they can be done once, and invoked as and when required. Another benefit is in terms of security. The central system talking to multiple backend system, if controlled and managed well, can bring in an added layer of security, along with the ease of centralized control. On the server side, the disparate data sources talk to one common interface, while on the client side, the transparence helps provide a cleaner, safer approach.
