Today, most folks around the world are going mobile. This trend is greatly impacting the way people utilize the internet and consequently how they interact with organizations and businesses on a global basis. Hence, today, most organizations are looking at the implications of going mobile and are considering how enterprise apps will work within the strategy they have chalked out for mobile.
Today, various IT teams across the globe are sparing no effort to increase the productivity of their developers as well as build enterprise apps faster and in a more cost effective manner. By this method, they ensure that they are multichannel and that they have been build for mobile.
Agile development is therefore a reality. The scenario today is much different from what it was only a few years ago, which meant that big projects included long delivery times. Now, businesses look for rapid response times in the face of change. Hence, the concept of agile has brought in time boxed development projects, which are altering the way project development is taking place all over the world.
Today, complex systems are made to integrate as well as work seamlessly. Regular and careful planning is necessary while all teams including IT from all parts of business need to cooperate. However, new tools and platforms have been discovered and invented, which allow developers to build enterprise software in a much quicker fashion, therefore tackling such development in much smaller chunks.
The Traditional Method
The traditional method of building software requires time to be spent on a methodology called ‘plumbing’. This creates a lot of underlying infrastructure before it comes to the developer to come down to the useful part of it. Within this approach, there are two sub approaches. The first involves using a high productivity platform that does all the plumbing, while you can focus on creating the business functionality. The other way is to allow the organization to build its own platform. However, this is a rare and expensive option.
Development methodology: The debate around it
If your organization is looking to go mobile, then how does the debate around development methodology benefit yours? According to analysts, 50 percent of enterprise apps today can benefit by going mobile. However, when enterprise apps are taken mobile, their numbers multiply by a factor between five and ten. It is not possible to scale to this magnitude, whether hand-coding or waterfall. However, there is a broad consensus on which tool to apply for mobile application development. For example, you could choose the native route and take a web-based (HTML5) approach. Alternatively, you could take a hybrid approach. You could apply these tools and methodologies using the following methods:
The Native Approach
The native approach is usually chosen when building highly specialized consumer apps. Native apps are mobile applications that are written in the sometimes-proprietary applications, which are prescribed or allowed by the mobile OS manufacturer. These apps usually provide a very rich user experience as they have been built specifically for the hardware of that particular device. Yet there is a downside to this trend. You will need to build a specific version of your app for every supported device. Specific teams are needed dedicated to each platform because of the uniqueness of each language and device. At the same time, outsourcing may be required to companies that specialize in that platform.
Web based development approach
Enterprises that aim to rapidly build apps that increase staff as well as business productivity, can utilize a web-based (HTML 5) development approach. As HTML5 is not device specific, you can develop the app once and then deploy across multiple platforms. Hence, it is great for mobile. For enterprise applications that often need changes and that too immediately, HTML5 is proving to be a good option. Hence, with the rapid advances in HTML5, web apps can do most of the things that native apps can do with much less overhead, when it comes to development overheads and maintenance resources.
The Goal of Hybrid Applications
Hybrid applications are becoming popular if you for when you need to combine elements from the native approach, but you need the benefits of the web. Hence the main goal of a hybrid application is to leverage the power of a native and the simplicity of a mobile web.
Finally, there is no doubt today, that mobile app development is a key priority in case of organizations that want to move forward. For this purpose, the IT teams need to move faster to accommodate more projects as part of their workload. This will cause IT to be more responsive to meet business needs.
