This week at Oracle Openworld 2012 there has been a significant amount of focus given to enabling mobile platform for our enterprise apps. Oracle has made some interesting moves in this area with both the preview release of Oracle ADF Mobile, as well as the latest updates to the Oracle Developer Cloud Service. There are some very nice features available from both ADF and ODCS that I recommend folks have a good look at.
With mobile growth rate explosion showing no signs of slowing, companies like Oracle, Adobe and Appcelerator are making investments to facilitate the path for enterprises to address the demand for mobile access to enterprise data and apps. Whether it is through updating enterprise app interfaces to support tablets and phones, providing hybrid app platforms, or exposing back-end enterprise data via APIs and connectors. If you are tasked with building a mobile app in the enterprise today, you'll find a lot more help than existed just 6-12 months ago.
The latest hybrid app platform from Oracle embeds PhoneGap as part of their solution, but also enhances what is generally possible with PhoneGap by providing common UI elements and business logic widgets out-of-the-box. The choice of a hybrid app platform over a native app, or mobile web-based approach (i.e. via Safari, Android browser or mobile Chrome) is increasingly looking like the logical choice if what you need is to get an enterprise app deployed into an App Store quickly for BYOD consumption.
Here at CA, we are seeing more of our customers take advantage of Service Virtualization (SV) to accelerate their mobile app development. By leveraging the capabilities in SV, mobile app teams doing development, testing and performance tuning can de-couple their apps from the backend services that are either providing business logic or serving as data-sources. This allows much faster iterations during app development which has been key to getting apps deployed quickly.
By having an entire infrastructure essentially in a box using SV, mobile app developers can verify business workflows directly from their mobile devices without requiring enterprise infrastructure access. Primary use-cases as well as edge-cases for their apps can be independently validated without affecting production systems or requiring test or dummy data to be placed into corporate databases.
This is a big win for most teams, especially when it comes to testing and performance tuning. We'll be talking a lot more about mobile in the upcoming months, especially as it relates to SV. In the meantime, check out the latest offerings in the space and let me know which platform you decide to go with for your app, and why.
