Mobile Web Next Big thing : What are the choices?

If you are serious about getting your website or web application mobile-friendly, the easiest, fastest and proven method is to start with a mobile application framework. Similar to programming frameworks like cakePHP, Zend Framework, mobile frameworks provide you with handy tools to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with mobile web development.


Most of the mobile frameworks consist of cross-browser consistent user interface elements and widgets,abstraction of boilerplate coding and wrappers for accessing native mobile OS functionalities.

And the best thing is that these frameworks allow you to use web technologies that you are already familiar with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

The choice of a mobile application framework will ultimately depend on your requirements, but this review of popular mobile application frameworks provides some useful tips to consider while selection a mobile development framework.

• Avoid platform specific frameworks: Developing solely for say iPhone is going to restrict your reach to other mobile devices (iPhone US market share is only 27%). Instead opt for a framework that can be used across a wide range of mobile OS.

• Choose a lightweight framework: Internet availability on mobile phone is extremely prone to slow connectivity or latency issues. You should consider a framework that generates optimized code/graphics, supports some level of caching and makes use of local storage.

• Leverage your existing web development skills: Stay away from frameworks that require you to learn a new language unless you have a specific reason to do so.

mobl

mobl is a new free and open source language designed specially to speed up building mobile applications. Using modern HTML5 technologies, mobl offers you a concise language to built native-feeling web apps that can be deployed on several platforms including iOS and Android. It borrows its syntax from JavaScript and its compiler automatically generate the related JavaScript and HTML files that can be then hosted to a web host.

Sencha Touch

Sencha Touch was one of the first true frameworks released for mobile web development. It allows you to develop mobile web apps that look and feel native on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry touch devices. It does so by leveraging technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript for the highest level of power, flexibility, and optimization. Sencha Touch is compatible with PhoneGap and this will enable you to distribute your application on the Apple App Store or Android Marketplace.

ChocolateChip

ChocolateChip is a lightweight JavaScript library aimed at developing web applications for mobile devices. It does so by allowing you to code using a special markup language called WAML (Web App Markup Language) that drives semantic meaning to your applications. Several custom tags and attributes provide you with a quicker way to create powerful and highly responsive UI including widgets, controls and buttons. It also has built-in support for AJAX, LocalStorage and SVG images. ChocolateChip is still in beta version and currently works on Webkit-based browsers only.

The-M-Project

The-M-Project is an HTML5 and JavaScript framework for developing cross-platform mobile apps. It comprises of JQuery mobile UI and core files along with build tool called Espresso which is in turn based on NodeJS. It has support for offline data (automatic cache manifest generation), internationalization and locate/remote storage. In addition, it can be integrated with the Cloud9 IDE. The-M-Project is still in alpha stage but the development roadmap looks very promising.

PhoneGap

PhoneGap takes a different approach to mobile web development. On the top of being an HTML5 app platform, it also allows you to author native application with normal technologies and get access to mobile OS's API and app stores â€" best of all, it has support for multiple platforms including iOS, BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, Android, Palm and Symbian OS. Some of the native features you can access (varies depending on platform) includes accelerometer, camera, compass, storage, geo location, sound notification and address book.

DHTMLX Touch

DHTMLX Touch is an HTML5-based JavaScript library for building mobile web applications. It's not just a set of UI widgets, but a complete framework that allows you to create eye-catching, cross-platform web applications for mobile and touchscreen devices. By using a fair choice of available UI elements, you can build interactive mobile apps for business or entertainment.

Applitude

Applitude is a runtime framework and a domain specific language (DSL) for iPhone application development. This language is made-to-measure to express iPhone apps, so instead of keywords like if, then, while it has keywords like contentprovider, tableview or cell. Applitude is a developer tool and as such, a good knowledge of iPhone development in Objective C is required.

Jo

Jo is an HTML5 mobile app framework that sports a pretty UI widget framework that allow you to manipulate DOM elements, events and data stuff. It works across different mobile platforms unlike other frameworks doesn't use a lot of resources. If you want to jam an existing web page into an application framework, jo probably isn't for you. jo is designed to create applications.

jQTouch

jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for mobile web development mostly geared towards the iPhone, iPod Touch and other forward-thinking devices. It provides a great framework for creating powerful mobile apps with just HTML, CSS and jQuery. It has native animations, automatic navigation and themes support.

jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile, touted as a touch-optimized Web framework for smartphones and tablets. Built on the top of jQuery and jQuery UI code, it provides a unified user interface across all major mobile device platforms. The code in itself is lightweight (12Kb compressed), flexible and supports a themeable design. Query Mobile makes use of several HTML5 and CSS3 features and if a mobile browser doesn't support some of these features yet, it will degrade gracefully without affecting the user experience.

baseJS

baseJS is a lightweight JavaScript framework intended for use with Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch; it also works with Firefox and all WebKit-based browsers. By providing shortcuts and reusable methods, baseJS helps you write code to be lightweight and extendable perfect for the mobile web.

Rhomobile

Rhomobile is a set of products primary meant for managing enterprise-level mobile apps and data. Rhomobile uses the power and productivity of web technology and the cloud to allow enterprises to more easily develop, distribute, deploy and manage native smartphone apps and data. The downside is that Rhomobile requires some knowledge of Ruby â€" could be an adoption pain if you've never worked with Ruby before.

Kurogo

Kurogo is a PHP framework for delivering high quality, data driven customizable content to a wide range of mobile devices. Its strengths lie in the customizable system that allows you to adapt content from a variety of sources and easily present that to mobile devices from feature phones, to early generation smart phones, to modern devices and tablets.The mobile web component exists as a based web application served using PHP. This application is hosted on a web server and users access it using the web browser on their mobile device.

Wink Toolkit

Wink Toolkit is a lightweight JavaScript toolkit which will help you build great mobile web apps. It is designed and developed to meet the specific constraints of the mobile environment. The toolkit's core offers all the basic functionalities a mobile developer would need from touch event handling to DOM manipulation objects or CSS transforms utilities. Additionally, it offers a wide range of UI components are offered to help you improve the look and feel of a web app, or simply to experiment with new user interactions.

Unify

Unify makes use of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript to create native-like applications for smartphones, tables and desktops. It also has a few dependencies like Sass Adobe Air and PhoneGap. A typical end user should not be able to distinguish an application built with Unify from a natively programmed application.

Source: http://www.articlediary.com/article/review-of-mobile-web-application-frameworks-909.html

Shape your IT with Mobile and Cloud computing

There’s been a lot of talk about cloud computing, and mobility has been in the news for years. But apps and an enterprise app store are going to bring it all together to remake the face of IT.

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a method for delivering computing resource. Its principal attributes are outsourced management, ubiquitous access and elasticity.
• Outsourced management allows us to obtain the use of software without having to deal with installing it, maintaining it, or managing the associated databases.
• Ubiquitous access means we can use the Internet to get to our software and data. Anywhere you can get access to the Internet, you can get access to your cloud computing application.
• Elasticity means we don’t have to worry about technology sizing. We don’t have to buy a server that will accommodate our peak demand, which maybe occurs only when the last Friday of a quarter corresponds to a full moon. Instead, we just use the resource we need, and we pay only for the resource we use. This is a very fair approach, and CFO’s love it.
Mobility
Mobility is one of those things that has snuck up on us. It started with mobile phones, then texting and mobile email, and now it’s gotten to the point where you can do anything just about anywhere. And if you think about it, that’s where things started in the first place. Before we got to the point of using computer systems, we relied on what we carried around with us to get our jobs done. We could move around freely to meet with customers and co-workers in the most appropriate environment for the job we needed to do. The idea that we should have to retreat to a single “corporate” location to find relevant data is an artificial creation of a time when computers were too bulky to carry around. The new reliance on portable computers and hand-held devices is just a return to where we started. We’ve thrown off the shackles of our behemoth computing captors and returned to a world where location is determined by our task — not by our limited access to data.
Apps
There’s a huge difference between an app and a traditional software application — particularly a Windows application:
• Apps can be self-installed in a few minutes by a novice. Traditional applications require lots of steps, the answers to a number of unanswerable technical questions, and often a restart of your computer system.
• Apps are intuitively easy to use. Applications require training and rote learning of arcane codes. That’s often because applications are more sophisticated than apps, but who came up with the stupid idea that an application has to be a swiss army knife and do hundreds of things when only a few things are really needed? Apps just do what’s needed; applications try to be adequate at everything and often end up being good at nothing.
• Apps automatically know how to get data from the principal data sources on your device. For example, apps which need address book or calendar information know how to get it. Traditional applications, on the other hand, require extensive configuration. You’ll have to be specific about telling your application exactly where to get data, even down to the directory where you’ve chosen to store it or the server where the data can be found.
• Apps can be installed without hurting other apps. Applications often interfere with other applications due to DLL overlaps and conflicting registry entries.
• Apps can be deinstalled without incident. Applications often leave behind old files and even software which will continue to haunt you when it conflicts with other applications you’ll later install.
Basically, apps are the new applications. They’re what applications should have been if we had been working in an environment which made apps possible.
Enterprise App Store
Anyone with a smart phone is familiar with the concept of an app store. You search for an app for a particular need, then buy it, download it and install it all in one easy step. An enterprise app store is just like the app store for a smart phone, except:
• The apps have gone through a selection and weeding-out process so that only the best and most appropriate business apps are available for your use.
• The store contains a mixture of generic and proprietary apps. The proprietary apps were designed, tailored, written or customized by people in your company to provide for the specific needs of your business. Those proprietary apps know how to access your corporate information and the cloud databases they use. And so when you use one of these proprietary apps, you’re actually updating the same corporate database that your company relies on for its day-to-day business.
• Access to the enterprise app store is secure, and only authorized employees are allowed to see certain apps. The apps you see in the store are restricted to those apps that make sense for your job and for your level of authorization within the company.
• There may be different versions of the same app. The version of the app you download will be determined by your job and level of authorization. For example, your app may let you look at your department, while your division vice-president’s app may let her look at the entire division.
Bringing It All Together
It you put all these things together — if you use cloud computing, mobility, apps and an enterprise app store — you can totally change the face of IT in your company. For starters, you have no need for a data center, since all of your data is stored in the cloud, and all of your applications are delivered through the Internet. Then you can drastically cut the size of your help desk, since you no longer have to worry about PC configuration issues for applications, and since apps are so much easier to use than traditional applications.
Of course, someone still has to develop the proprietary apps, but you’ll probably outsource most of that work. So the primary work of the IT organization will be:
• Strategic Technology Leadership — determining what ought to be done
• Systems Architecture and Integration — determining how corporate systems should look, breaking the requirements down into individual products, databases and apps, and then developing an overall approach for implementing what’s needed
• Project Management — leading projects for major technology initiatives
And yes, there will still be a need for some help desk support, but with properly designed apps, the amount will be much less than what is required today.
Conclusion
Each of these factors — cloud computing, mobility and intuitive apps — has had an impact on IT. But together these three factors, in conjunction with an enterprise app store, are going to totally reinvent IT. You can lead the change in your business, or you can drag your feet and get left behind. The choice is up to you.
Source : http://blog.makingitclear.com/2011/01/31/cloudmobileapp/

Business Mobility Market Outlook: 2011

Enterprise Mobility trends for year 2011

by Purushottam Darshankar

As we look back at year 2010, one can see many changes in mobility space. Some of these changes were evident from the way how tablets and other mobile hardwares made news this year. As global economy is heading out of recession, more and more organizations have started to see mobility as a strategic differentiator and see expanding role of individual-liable device in enterprise mobility.

According to analyst firm, Gartner Cloud computing, social networking, mobile devices and applications are the technologies that businesses should plan for - they may not adopt them all, but they must at least be aware of them and thinking about how they fit in their organisation and relate to all the other technologies.

Though it’s unfair to compare device platforms directly, Symbian will still lead its market share in 2011 because of Nokia’s entrenchment in low-end feature phones across the globe, while all other players are aiming to make high-end smartphones. Android at second position and gaining its market share day-by-day has an added advantage of recruiting many manufacturers to its cause. RIM at third position uses its blackberry OS only for mobile phone unlike android and iOS who have spanned their platforms for phones and tablets.

In 2010, iPad became the most quickly adopted electronic gadget in history that brought new levels of usability to computing. These are most suited for users who do not need full functionality of PC especially for travelling executives, employees on field , management top brass etc. Tablets such as iPad, RIMs Playbook that runs on QNX , Samsung Galaxy tab will start replacing laptops with expected sale of 54 million in 2011. We’re going to see a slew of iPad competitors hit the market early next year. The trend of rich UI based touchscreen devices will continue with over 60 percent devices to include the use of multi-touch interfaces to be shipped in Western Europe and North America in 2011.

With large screen and greater computing power, tablet will be the choice for enterprises. 2011 may see enterprises purchasing and deploying tablets for their employees. This will demand increasingly sophisticated device management and security solution that can protect device, network and applications that are running on device. 3G/4G services such as LTE and WiMax will continue to increase and market will see improved technologies to store and manage content such as audio, video and images. BT 4.0 and its low energy LE technology will enable range of peripheral devices to be used by devices to enable new functions.

Over 75 percent of devices shipped in mature market will have GPS capabilities, enabling wide range of B2B or B2E location aware applications. If local privacy regulations are addressed, enterprise will see good adoption of such applications that can bring significant improvement in productivity and operational efficiencies.

The M2M (machine-to-machine) market is highly fragmented but wide range of low cost network devices is helping industry grow 30 percent year-on-year. The applications such as meter reading, security/surveillance, automotive systems, vending and point of sale, remote tracking and monitoring will be in demand.

Cloud computing acceptance will accelerate in the small business sector during 2011. Mobile solutions will begin to exploit the cloud in order to provide lower cost of entry point to mobility solutions for SMBs. Telecom players will align and move their service offering on Cloud model – easy to use pay-as-you–go model

The focus on green IT will continue, as organizations are sensitive and more aware of reducing their carbon footprint via different methods like reducing paper consumption, reduced power usage, reducing travel etc. Mobility has been well positioned in providing the underlying foundation for more eco-friendly society.

Cloud makes enterprise mobility more compelling

How cloud makes enterprise mobility compelling

by Purushottam Darshankar

Cloud represents substantial change in how IT systems are built, used and sold. Economic and competitive factors have forced companies to look to a new model of providing IT services. Instead of building servers and datacenters supported by a significant number of well trained staff and increasing power costs, organizations are looking to outside firms to provide the services they need and take away their pain. However, concerns around security and relinquishing control over sensitive corporate data have been stalling the widespread adoption of cloud computing in the last couple of years.

When it comes to enterprise mobility , it needs to be able to connect to ERP, CRM, SCM , Database or other legacy systems and offer unfettered access to all types of devices, from Apple, Blackberry, NOKIA, Samsung and many more.

The device market being highly fragmented, the question companies face is should this access be a browser based to get rid of device-specific complexity? – But this approach rarely works because people need offline access to enterprise data. The core of this complexity is device platform, i-Phone OS, Goggles Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry, WebOS, Symbian, Bada and various Linux flavors. Companies are becoming increasingly frustrated with the limited reach of mobile apps and growing cost of launching and maintaining mobile apps. The cloud that bring in enterprise mobile middleware make the application to work on different device platform and also offer the management console to deploy and manage the applications. Though multidevice support increasingly looks inevitable, the question companies need to answer: Can you afford to support multiple devices for a given business application?

The core advantage of mobile middleware platform available on cloud is that it lets you quickly develop and deploy the application. The platform offers complete solution composed of application development framework, hosted development environment and prebuilt adapters to interact with different backend systems. It also addresses enterprise's mobile security needs - especially remote wipe and lock - through device management solution.

Lots of enterprise software companies have failed to provide the necessary hooks and links that would allow the millions of mobile workers to seamlessly extract the real-time and relevant information from backend systems. Today’s enterprises have added to integration complexities due to their complex, distributed and heterogeneous nature. Some of the enterprise software companies have a solution for i-Phone but not for Blackberries or vice versa, while others have solution that works for Windows mobile but not for others. SAP, which currently supports Windows Mobile for its CRM application, is due to introduce its new release to deliver a mobile version of its CRM product to Blackberries. Now that other device platforms have emerged such as Android, Bada , SAP has acquired Sybase to develop software that lets customers more easily port apps to multiple devices.

There's a particular class of services, needs for the business, that if tried to address in the traditional application-centric models, they become too expensive to start or they tend to be so complex that they fail to take-up. Not everything is applicable for mobility cloud computing, one need to figure out exactly which processes, services, information are good candidates for cloud computing and accordingly offer such services. But a much larger savings can be done if one can restructure the application itself so that it can be delivered and amortized across a much larger user base. There's a huge economic value if the application can take advantage of horizontal scaling – one can add compute capacity easily in a commodity environment to be able to meet demand, and then remove the capacity and use it for another purpose when the demand subsides. Economic viability is a strong driver for companies to go for cloud, and that drive will prevail over technical challenges.

It’s CommunicAsia’10 in Singapore after…MWC & CTIA

Summary of CommuunicAsia 2010
by Purushottam Darshankar

CommunicAsia event is considered to be the next big event for mobile network and communication vendors after MWC in Barcelona and CTIA in Las Vegas. Annually organized by Singapore Exhibition Services Pte Ltd, CommunicAsia is considered to be Asia's most recognized and the unparalleled one-stop ICT platform. It provides a global platform for showcasing the convergence of the latest digital technologies across mobile networks and applications, network infrastructure and satellite communications.

Over four days visitors hailing from different countries saw the cutting edge technologies and business solutions targeted towards consumer and enterprise market. The event spread over eight halls, totaling 58,000 square meters of floor space, saw a total of 1,923 exhibiting companies from over 60 countries and regions. covering solutions throughout the value chain of convergent technologies.

Thrilling crowds at CommunicAsia were various new launches of new-generation mobile phones. Samsung chose the show as a platform to launch a new touchscreen smartphones - the Galaxy (Android) devices – globally.

To help businesses capture growth and keep professionals abreast and on the pulse of the fast-evolving communication industry, conferences highlighting key industry topics like mobile services and business models, network enablers and architectures, satellite communications, mobile TV and entertainment, IPTV, were organised alongside the exhibition. Over 100 international speakers presented on the latest industry trends, innovations and business cases.

...more on my particiaption