Trends in porting existing PC applications to the mobile environment - Research Paper Example

19 March Trends in porting existing pc applications to the mobile environment The onset of the Smartphone revolution has led to the unprecedented growth of mobile internet users globally. This has opened a new market and developers are now either developing brand new applications for the mobile phone platform or porting the existing ones. There are a variety of languages that application developers use including openC, Java, Javascript, XHTML/CSS, Python and Mobile Ajax. Even content developers for the mobile platform can enrich their content using multimedia like videos and multimedia messaging.

There are over 4000 device platforms today and at least 80 different mobile operators. This makes porting existing PC applications to the mobile environment an uphill task for the developers (Damianos Gavalas and Daphne Economou) Interoperability is by far the largest impediment in application development. There are so many devices that run on totally different operating systems, having different screen sizes among other local requirements of the markets. Mobile app developers are therefore faced with a unique challenge of making apps that will work flawlessly across the different platforms.

That is why porting of applications is probably the most important concern for app developers today. When porting of applications, there are three important considerations to make. The first is the device type. You have to consider that the app will be running on smart phones, brew devices, or J2ME devices. The second consideration to make is the operating systems used. Quite a number of mobile apps usually need some native functions of a specific operating system. This makes it almost impossible for developers to write code only once and reuse it across the different platforms.

Thirdly, you need to consider the device features. Different mobile devices have different features like screen size, keyboard types, and internal memory. A good app must put the variations into perspective (Damianos Gavalas and Daphne Economou). Works CitedDamianos Gavalas and Daphne Economou. Development Platforms for Mobile Applications: Status and Trends.INFOQ. 01 Jan 2009. Web. 19 March 2013.