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On the Road: Again and Again


By SD Times News Team
August 15, 2004 — 
The concept of application mobility may be a solution-or a series of solutions-looking for a problem.

Consulting companies, platform vendors, tools providers, carriers-nearly everyone in the software development ecosystem has jumped onto the mobility bandwagon. Make applications run on a smart phone. Enable seamless WiFi-based rich-client computing. Bring the client/server model to Windows CE devices. Add lightweight databases, message-queuing middleware, runtime containers. Make it mobile.

It's an impressive vision, and at conferences like JavaOne and Tech-Ed, there are many equally impressive demonstrations. There are only two problems with mobility, as presented today by the vendor community. First, real-world applications aren't as easy to build, deploy and manage as their slick demonstrations would lead you to think. Second, while some enterprises may have a compelling need to write new mobilized applications or extend existing ones, the majority of enterprise apps need never go beyond the firewall-or the desktop.

For the past decade, more or less, enterprise developers, and ISVs writing business applications, could count on at least some homogeneity among client platforms. For the most part, for example, they were running a full-featured operating system, typically a flavor of Windows or the Macintosh, and thus offered a fairly consistent API. More recently, cross-platform apps could be written to run within a browser, or in a J2SE virtual machine.

Further, the developer or post-deployment administrator didn't have to worry about the connection between the client and the server. It was consistent and persistent, and could be safely ignored.

There were also no transaction costs, no intermediaries, between the client and a server. Even if there were a remote-access link, such as over a dial-up modem, Frame Relay connection or an Internet VPN, it, again, could be ignored.

Within the world of mobility, that's not true. There are many form factors of clients, each with its own operating system, hardware constraints and runtime environment. Connection quality can vary tremendously. There are many service providers in the loop, some of which want to collect tolls for message traffic, or for making available a downloaded application.

Developers, administrators and line-of-business customers who want mobilized applications have to prepare not only for the added complexity of writing applications that will support such a diverse client population, but also for new post-deployment expenses in operating them.

Another factor: The character of client hardware, software and connectivity is changing rapidly, meaning it's likely that mobilized applications being written today will have to be rewritten or upgraded, again and again, merely to keep up with client-side developments. That's not a happy scenario for those enterprises that already see a huge backlog within their application development department.

And what's the business case again?

So, while it's laudable that the industry is working to create new platforms for mobility, they need to do a better job of simplifying the entire development, deployment and management stack, while narrowing the choices facing enterprises. Otherwise, this technology's never going to get out of the lab.


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