Progress Software has released of an upgrade to the Telerik mobile application development platform in the cloud that enables developers to create applications using JavaScript.
Fresh off of acquiring Telerik at the end of 2014, Progress Software is starting the new year with the release this week of an upgrade to the Telerik mobile application development platform in the cloud that enables developers to create applications using JavaScript that can run native, on the Web or in a hybrid fashion.
Rather than forcing developers to embrace one approach, the Telerik Platform allows developers to adapt to different application requirements, says Brandon Satrom, director of product marketing for the Telerik unit of Progress Software. For example, a consumer application may need to run native on a particular mobile computing device. But an enterprise application is likely to be deployed across multiple devices. In that scenario, developers may opt to deploy that application on the Web or as a hybrid application.
Regardless of the approach or use case, Satrom contends that developers should not be forced to change application development platforms and methodologies to support different application use cases and scenarios.
In time, workflow is likely to span multiple mobile computing applications, some of which are aimed at consumers while others are aimed at employees, Satrom notes. The ability to federate data access across those applications using a common back-end system is critical, he says.
Telerik says that more than 20,000 applications spanning 600 organizations have been created using Telerik Cloud. In fact, Telerik wants Telerik Cloud to be viewed as an end-to-end platform for testing and building applications. To that end, Telerik Cloud includes automated application testing tools that can span hundreds of devices, along with a Verified Plugins Marketplace, a gallery of Cordova/PhoneGap plug-ins. The result, says Satrom, is access to open source Cordova APIs that can be leveraged to create applications that include myriad features.
Obviously, it’s too early to say how the mobile application development wars will play out in the cloud. There’s no shortage of options available. But going into 2015, enterprise IT organizations are going to ask mobile application developers to develop applications using platforms that make it simpler to both reuse code and access back-end services. The days when developers built every mobile application from the ground up are coming to a close because organizations no longer want to be held hostage to a particular developer. In addition, manually building every mobile application is simply taking too long.
As such, mobile application developers in 2015 will be looking at new ways of building mobile applications that not only scale in terms of performance perspective, but also the rate at which they can be built.