Marking what has been a multi-year journey, Telerik today unveiled Telerik Platform, which combines a rich set of tools for developing applications for multiple platforms with cloud services that manage the application lifecycle process.
Marking what has been a multi-year journey, Telerik today unveiled Telerik Platform, which combines a rich set of tools for developing applications for multiple platforms with cloud services that manage the application lifecycle process.
Telerik Platform provides an adaptive framework for creating applications regardless of whether the application runs on the Web, native or hybrid mode. In addition, the platform doesn’t force developers to choose what platform they plan to run that application on, says Todd Anglin, the company's executive vice president of cross-platform tools and services.
Specifically, Telerik Platform can be used to support any iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows or Blackberry device running Microsoft.net, JavaScript/HTML5, Java JSP and PHP code.
Other benefits of the Telerik Platform include simplified data management, data integration, integrated user management and push notifications for multiple apps from a single unified services infrastructure, says Anglin. Access to analytics make it easier to identify user behavior patterns.
In addition to launching Telerik Platform, the company for the first time is making a subscription-based pricing model for one of its offerings in addition to a freemium edition intended to introduce more developers to the company’s core development tools, Anglin says.
Telerik is not the only company pursuing a multi-platform approach to development, but Anglin says Telerik Platform reflects a general movement among developers away from being tied to a specific platform. Developers can no longer be certain what platforms will be most popular a few years down the road, so rather than making them rewrite the same application multiple times, Telerik Platform allows developers to manage the same code base across multiple platforms, he says.
That means developers can focus more on what their application needs to do versus how it might be delivered to a particular segment of end users, he says.
Of course, Telerik is trying to overcome the inertia of developers who are wedded to a particular development environment. Historically, developers have all too often defined themselves by the tools they use to develop applications for a specific platform.
In a world where no one is sure what mobile computing platform will dominate the future of IT, developers clearly need to avail themselves of the platform that allows them to keep the greatest number of options open.