It would be difficult to miss the revolution in computing that is happening around us. While the Internet has been a viable commercial environment for almost two decades and mobile phones commonplace for years beyond that, the last two years have seen incredible developments as these two movements have converged and begun to accelerate together forming the next generation of computing. Since the introduction of the Apple iPhone, our expectations of what we should be able to do with a phone has grown by magnitudes. There has been a rush to provide applications and services, operating systems, and hardware in an attempt to fulfill these expectations.
The world of application development is in transition with web-based applications and services becoming the dominant development model:
Increasingly powerful web applications are now providing solutions previously addressed only with embedded or desktop applications.
Web developers have assumed the leadership in software application innovation.
Mobile users have strong preferences toward web brands and aren’t willing to accept equivalent solutions—only the authentic experience provided by the preferred brands will do.
Web services are providing easy-to-use building blocks and tools to allow developers to leverage those web services through mashups and specialized applications.
Web applications can be built faster and easier than embedded applications; they are easier to deploy, update, and maintain, resulting in a lower development cost.
Where once the client operating systems provided the complete platform that application developers leveraged to deliver their solutions, the Web itself is emerging as the platform, and client operating systems are becoming a means to access the web platform. Those who can deliver a superior user interface (UI) on highly optimized hardware while leveraging web services and applications stand to gain.