JavaZone 2010 - Ghost in a cell
How the Cloud is and will be an invisible presence in many mobile applications.
As two technologies that are increasing rapidly in importance and spread both PaaS/SaaS and mobile devices (“phones”) are highly important technologies on their own. Closer to 750 million people are now using cellphones world wide. And PaaS is in the beginning of every hype curve.
Together these two technologies pose an emerging opportunity and solution to many existing and likely business cases.
The needs that drive these business cases are on one hand the need for a mobile application with an optimal usage of the mobile device when it comes to screen size, GUI lock and feel, processing and bandwidth. And on the other side the need for at least one or more of the following:
- High processing capabilities, high volumes of data and high bandwidth.
- Collaboration, Data sharing, Multitasking and Scheduling
The type off distributed application that emerges from these needs and wants are applications where the client is a cellphone with a thin or semi-thick client software with a backend running on a PaaS solution.
The high and growing number of cellphones with increasing capabilities means that the potential market is far larger than for a personal computer software solution.
There are a number of reasons why the PaaS approach is preferable and possibly the only solution compared to a thick client software solution on the cellphone. These can be the limited storage space, processing power and bandwidth. Also the need realtime and data with a short shelf life dictates a solution where the data is aggregated and stored centrally. Sharing data and collaboration are others.
The client ideally uses the native lock and feel of the client platform. The bandwidth needed between the cellphone client and PaaS side should be optimized by using lean protocols and possible compression of data. The PasS side should be able to scale dynamically based on changing client numbers.
Martin Malm
Developer and architect with an interest in the opportunities and challenges given by PaaS and Mobile clients. This interest being sparked by work on an iphone app with a Google App engine backend.