Develop It Once, Run It Anywhere, Key Theme at SWANH Mobile Application Platform Symposium
Decreasing the total cost of development and deployment . . . lowering the complexity . . . leveraging standard technologies and tools. With hundreds of mobile phone service providers, thousands of devices, and scores of operating systems to choose from, these are the sorts of things mobile that application developers have to do in order to remain profitable in the emerging—and lucrative—mobile application market. These topics were on everyone’s mind at the Software Association of New Hampshire’s Mobile Application Platform Symposium in Bedford Tuesday night.
You want to “develop once, run it everywhere,” said Bob Chesley, founder of NHSoftwerks, a Newmarket, NH application development shop with a great deal of experience in developing apps as part of barcode reader solutions—a niche in which being able to develop for multiple platforms is imperative. When you develop for multiple platforms, you may “lose some of the bells and whistles of the native code, but you get most of the functionality you need.” Developing with the user interface in mind is imperative as well, said Chesley, since with multiple platforms come multiple ways of interacting with the platform physically, like a keyboard, touchscreen, stylus, or wheel.
Jim O’Neil, developer evangelist for Microsoft, echoed Chesley’s sentiment that the ability to develop for multiple platforms was imperative. And that’s why Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 offers so many different emulators and testing tools (like GPS tracking, stress input simulation, and cellular network simulation) to give developers the help they need. In a quick demonstration of Visual Studio 2008, the same tool a developer would use to build a standard Windows application, O’Neil took the crowd through the steps of developing a mobile app from scratch . . . albeit with a few glitches. And even though O’Neil boasted of a Windows Mobile ecosystem of 140-plus devices and 125-plus operators, O’Neil couldn’t resist taking a canned dig at Apple and the iPhone.
According to Mike Glover, a member of the Google Android platform development team, that very ecosystem—that “food chain”—dissatisfied internet giant Google, and that’s why they entered into the mobile market. “We’re driven by possibilities, not constrained by limits,” said Glover. Citing that Android, an open source software stack for mobile applications, was developed with the understanding that mobile phones may very well be the first exposure to the broader internet for a large number of the world’s population, Glover claimed Android was trying to set a good example, and create an environment in which everyone could win. Removing what Glover claimed were the two main barriers to innovation in the mobile space was crucial: fragmented platforms and the mobile operators themselves, who didn’t want to become “dumb bit pipes.”
“The relationship should be between the user and the developer,” said Glover. “Right now, it’s between the developer and the operator.”
By Robert Pothier