In a recent SD Times article entitled “Rise of the Androids” by Alex Handy, Android was portrayed as a rising contender to iPhone and Blackberry. I would agree that Android is in fact rising rapidly given the growth in numbers of developers joining various mobile platform developer groups. This growth is quite interesting to track on a daily basis almost.
Crackberry.com, home to several mobile development groups reported (at least yesterday when I checked) that AndroidCentral membership has grown by more than 20,000 in less than one month to 201,248 members. Blackberry’s membership was 2.8 million members and iOS membership was 62,075 (numbers change daily). I’d say it might be conceivable for Android to overcome iOS this year, but based on the sheer number of developers developing Blackberry applications I think it will take longer for Android to overcome Blackberry.
As an executive for Midnight Coders, an integration company, I’m seeing lots of interest in mobile applications from our Enterprise customers. These are customers that have built rich internet applications in Flex, Flash and Silverlight for example and are now looking for ways to extend their .NET, Java and PHP services to mobile devices. But, the challenge of course is dealing with a whole new set of APIs and integration issues, such as:
- how to configure mobile applications to invoke backend services,
- how to load data from the server-side into mobile applications,
- how to exchange messages between different client types,
- how to push messages from the server to the client;
- how to connect mobile applications with services running in the Cloud.
Mark Piller, CEO of Midnight Coders and creator of WebORB, recently demonstrated at a Denver RIA Developers Group event how to connect an Android app with a MySQL database running in Google AppEngine in order to do data management from Android.
While Mark demonstrated running a Flex remoting application in AIR on Android that leveraged AMF remoting, WebORB also enables remoting for native Android. Enterprises that have adopted a rich internet application strategy nine times out of ten utilize remoting as a means for high speed data transmission across the wire, which is much faster than can be done via web services. This is great news for Enterprises that want to work with technologies they are already familiar with.
If you’d like to see how this is done, please join us for another webinar on Building Android Applications Using WebORB. This webinar is on March 10th at 11am (central). Register Here
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