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 Notes for Enterprise IT Managers I’ve discovered that my time spent running an online community fostered a sense of complacency regarding the difficulties in wireless application development. When your days are spent listening to PR professionals explain how their products support the construction of mobile enterprise apps at the click of a button, after a while you begin to believe it! Try focusing on just how difficult it is to deploy an industrial-strength mobile solution. Mike Loos, chief technology officer of @Hand, likes to refer to the application GUI development stage as the “tip of the iceberg” in mobile development, and I agree. Consider a few of the major issues in deploying a powerful solution for your work force. Network Coverage There’s a disconnect between what companies need and what many tool/platform vendors are providing: the reliability of a full-time wireless connection. Many solutions–including WAP, SMS and others–work fine, if you have a signal. What happens when a delivery truck or repair vehicle travels into an area with low or nonexistent signal strength? Should productivity drop to zero because a data collection app quit functioning? One of the ironies of wireless, it has been said, is that the best wireless apps don’t require a connection. If you provide information to a broad consumer base, mass-market technologies such as WAP and SMS work fine. If you’re enabling a small group of mission-critical mobile workers, you’ll have to dig deeper. Database Synchronization Once you’ve decided which, if any, of your users require full-time access to the mobile application, the next hurdle involves the storage of data on the devices and the synchronization of that data with one or more back-end data stores. Platforms such as Palm OS and Windows CE offer synchronization capabilities–through HotSync and ActiveSync, respectively–but the architectures/APIs for these technologies differ greatly. Other platforms, including Windows laptops, don’t offer any default sync option, making it difficult to build a cross-platform sync solution. In this issue (see page 18) I examine several popular mobile databases, all of which offer powerful synchronization capabilities. Multiple Platforms Depending on the size of your organization, there is a real possibility you’ll have to support a wide range of devices. The application I’m currently working on is targeted at Win32, Windows CE, Palm OS, RIM and the ever-popular “anything else that comes along over the next year or two” device. Realize that not all mobile users are created equal. A two-way pager user probably will interact with the enterprise application differently than a laptop or a PDA user. Identifying the user “classes” up front and molding the application to fit that platform helps keep all users happy. Technologies that support code reuse such as Java are moving out of the “R&D” department and into prime time with capable VMs available for all major PDA platforms as well as pagers and phones from RIM, Motorola and Nokia. Application Management We finally arrive at the problem of deploying the mobile application to hundreds or thousands of mobile clients. Applications sometimes possess bugs and thus it’s highly likely that you’ll be asked to regularly roll out updates to your app. Deployment solutions such as this are available from companies such as Aether, @Hand and Oracle–and can be built for free, if you’re a Java developer–but it’s still a step to consider. Understanding these particular challenges–to say nothing of multiple wireless protocols, limited bandwidth and device storage, and other issues–will allow you to produce a long-term solution that’s ready for the “real world.”
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