Start Your Engines: Mobile Application Development

oftware engineering is all about choices. Choices have to be weighed: performance vs. scalability, complexity vs. flexibility, pros vs. cons, and good vs. poor design. In mobile application development, we have achieved that "many choices" state. In fact, in twenty years of software development, I cannot recall another time when there were so many choices. Before the days of Java vs. .NET, I recall interesting meetings to choose the programming language for a new application. Today's mobile application development environments make some of those choices look like child's play. So the good news is: we have so many choices! The bad news is: we have so many choices and we must choose wisely.

Look up "mobile development" in Wikipedia, and you will notice the editors of this particular topic have listed 11 different choices for application development on a mobile platform. While the editors have done a good job of listing some of the more popular and widely used programming languages, environments, tools, etc. that same article admits that the listing is not complete. In fact, assembling such a list and keeping it up to date is nearly impossible. For example, just one day before writing this article, Apple released its SDK for the iPhone. New tools and platforms for mobile applications emerge all the time.

If someone else was responsible for choosing the platform for your mobile application development work, that limits—but does not eliminate—other choices. Alternatively, if you are in the position whereby your proposed killer app gets to determine the device platform, the playing field is wide open, and there are many options you need to explore; some have been around for some time, while others are just emerging. How do you choose? What are the factors to explore?

So the good news is: we have so many choices! The bad news is: we have so many choices and we must choose wisely.