SDForum: Trends in Mobile App Development

On Friday, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel at SDForum’s Developer Conference on trends in mobile application development. Alongside representatives from Sun, Nokia and others, we discussed emerging ways that mobile apps were being built. Two in particular seemed to capture the panel’s interest:

high level, declarative development

the success of HTML for web development provided a much more productive, portable, and powerful way of developing apps. Declarative development through either HTML or XML is emerging as a way to develop other kinds of apps as well: both rich desktop apps and mobile apps.

For desktop software, often known as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), this is evidenced by technologies such as Adobe Flex (an XML for RIAs) and Titanium’s AppCelerator. For mobile software the category is even more nascent, and examples include Rhodes, PhoneGap, and Nokia’s Web RunTime (WRT) for Series 60 devices.

pushing computing to the edge

In the early days of computing, apps were primarily centralized on mainframes and minis, and accessed remotely by users. The advent of personal computers in the 1980s enabled a new generation of locally hosted and used applications on individual’s own desktops, spawning an exciting new array of capabilities. The dawn of the web in the 1990s created a swing back toward many “centralized apps” accessed by ubiquitously available web browsers. Finally in the last few year the explosion of smartphones as fullfledged computing devices has created yet another new generation of applications, that take advantage of these device’s new capabilities by executing locally on devices again.

The Rhodes framework is a great way for developers to take advantage of both of these trends.