Mobile software applictions: Developers are changing their thinking and their application design to meet the mobile challenge.

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by Chris S. Thomas, chief strategist, Intel Corp.


Last month I wrote about how existing software architecture breaks down in a mobile environment. This month I look at how developers are changing their thinking and their application design to meet the mobile challenge.

As I said last time, users need applications savvy enough to switch seamlessly from connected to unconnected and back again, fast enough to eliminate latency, and flexible enough to enable users to work on any device they please.

Today's software can't do it, but tomorrow's can.

We can divide the journey from here to there into two stages: the Band-Aid stage, where vendors adapt current software to make it work better in mobile environment, and the Designed for Mobile stage, where vendors redesign from the ground up to create truly mobile applications.

Stage I: Band-Aid

I call this the Band-Aid stage because it's just an interim solution while developers prepare to code for mobility. This is a time of patches and quick fixes designed to keep an application from outright failing in a mobile environment; it's not a permanent answer.

The Band-Aid stage is just beginning. If you look under the hood of recent versions of popular enterprise application software from vendors like PeopleSoft, SAP, Pivotal and others, you'll see that they have started to adapt their existing architecture. Developers are tweaking code just to get some sort of mobile functionality running—or at least making sure their applications don't lock up the device every time the user moves in or out of network range.

For example, we're used to setting our e-mail to offline mode when we move from office to conference room and back again, and we can download Web pages to look at later. Now developers are adding this capability to other types of software so users don't have to recycle an application every time they reconnect to the network (hooray!).

Developers are also adding new or beefing up existing caching functions, creating small databases that applications can run locally whether connected to the network or not.




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