Oct 23rd, 2009 |
I’ve done a bit of mobile phone development in my time and let me tell you, the #1 frustration is dealing with the massive number of variations in mobile phone platforms. Developing for a mobile is similar to saying that you’re going to develop a handbag for the latest fashion craze that might last a whole 6 months. If there are mobile phone vendors out there wondering why the enterprise hasn’t adopted more mobile platforms and why the crackberry has done so amazingly well….well my spin is that developers aren’t willing to re-write their entire system every six months.
Heck I might be smoking something, but it occurs to me that the iPhone may have solved this issue for a segment of the market….imagine that a standard phone platform that’s going to be around for longer than six months…so what happened to Windows Mobile? Just take a hard look at how many variants there are on the market and stop wondering.
Let’s get to the point, a while back I got a press release on mobile device virtualization…imagine, being able to develop for a single environment and port to a large number of devices. When I had a conversation with a mobility vendor at VoiceCon, they were quietly crossing their fingers that the promises were more than just vaporware.
http://www.vmware.com/technology/mobile/
So let’s really get to the point….virtualization can be many things to different folks….I happen to use it for servers, but I also use it for regression testing on legacy platforms. Instead of keeping a whole lot of old machines laying around, now I can run them under VMWare and test to my heart’s content. Not only that, because the virtualized platform has an unchanging set of hardware, I can create and image that isn’t going to need serious tweaking and drivers in a year or so down the road. So now if I’ve got to extract some important data out of a legacy app, I can go through the install pain once, and then save the VM for when I need it, and be able to expect it to actually run a year down the line.
So with all this promise of lengthening the lifespan of an application, virtualization may just be a viable answer to the mobile developers trying to break into the enterprise world.
