Thursday, June 02, 2011

Multi Platform Mobile Development Approach


One of the biggest challenges faced by the IT teams of large organizations is their ability to support multiple platforms. This gets further burgeoned as mobile OSes continue to wax and wane, the pressing question remains: Which devices to support and which to ignore? Added to this is the even increasing demand from the users for more and more applications and in a shorter period of time.
Endeavour, “The Mobility Company”, has been into mobile solutions, consulting, and advisory space for the past nine years and we have seen the mobile platforms evolve as well as stupor. We have seen evolution of cross-OS platform solutions coming to the fore and promising to offer almost everything which is possible on a native platform but the truth is that they are only alternatives and in no way come even close to native application development.
The approach to multiple mobile platform support therefore lies with the ability to build reusable components, which could be readily customized thereby minimizing the development time and effort while retaining the strengths of native application development on respective platforms.
Middleware at the same time also plays key role in mobile solutions, and has evolved along with the mobile devices, the technologies and the demanding needs created by this combination. These middleware cater to various needs such as multiple file formats, media formats, data sources, content re purposing and so on. A common middleware catering to multiple platforms is a challenge on its own, as the middleware has to play key role of handling multiple content formats and converting them to overcome the limitations in individual platforms.
Mobile Enterprise Knowledge Platform (MEKP)
At Endeavour, these common routines and re-usable components form an enterprise application development repository. Mobile Enterprise Knowledge Platform (MEKP) has huge knowledge base of components and each of these components holds individual responsibility for managing the application system. They are well managed, reviewed, documented for re-utilization.
Mobile Enterprise Knowledge Platform is a collection of components that comprises of three sections.
      1.     Mobile Application Layer
      2.     Middleware components
      3.     Data connectivity layer
Each section holds responsibility of inter exchange of data across the layers on various modules.

Mobile Application Layer:  It is a collection re-usable component specifically made for mobile platforms. Each component is created to act independently and is also capable of adding services for the mobile application.

Middleware components: This component acts as a data storage and data exchange layer between the Mobile Application layer and the backend system. It comprises of various component that are common for all listed mobile platforms. A common workflow model has been formed to exchange the data between these modules.
Data connectivity Layer: This layer holds responsibility for establishing and managing connections between the middleware and backend system. There are external interface connectors provided to interact with backend system.
Conclusion
So, if you are planning for a mobile application and struggling to figure our the best platform to select as well as manage the development effort within your schedule then we should be able to assist.


mobile application development

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