As part of my day job, I work for IBM. Full disclosure, I work in the Rational software brand. As part of my job, I am focused on mobile development. To that end, I was able to go the IBM Impact in Las Vegas, Nevada this part week. It was amazing to see the number of people in the enterprise who are focused on mobile. From customers, partners, analysts, and IBMers, everyone was focused on mobile and looking at how they could extend their applications to take advantage of mobile devices.
IBM showed of their IBM Mobile Foundation, this is the first IBM version of the recently purchased WorkLight studio and server. For those who don’t follow enterprise applications, this allows for creation of hybrid mobile applications. A hybrid application is one that is combination of html5 and native platform code. This “best of both worlds” way of developing allows for common functions across multiple platforms, iOS, android, and windows mobile, while supporting native code for those functions which need access to device capabilities, i.e. the camera, or address book.
My focus for this blog and podcast ( when I can get time to get the podcast started ), is more about stand alone apps, for end users, not hybrid apps or enterprise users. However, it was certainly exciting to see all of this excitement in the enterprise. This will allow more and more developers to become mobile enabled, and that means that we will see more apps being developed for home and fun!