The Network is the Mobile Phone
Once upon a time there was the Mainframe: large and expensive computers with the ability to support hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, that used dumb terminals to connect. Then it came the personal computer, and everything (software and data) moved to the users' terminal. And then, the servers returned, with clusters, grids and clouds.
Sever vs. Clients, this is one of those issues that never seem to go away. Where we should store our data? And the applications we use? Is the Network the Computer, as Sun Microsystems' singular vision claims, and Google is preaching? Or everything should be keep safe in our personal computer, as Microsoft has been doing the last decades?
And the funny point is that the Severs vs. Clients war has arrived to our mobile phones. Why? Because smartphones have become highly capable computer terminals, with lots of memory, computing power, and connected to the Internet. So the debate is here: Where the applications should be? On the server side or stored in the phones themselves? Being more specific, shall we concentrate in developing native applications, as Apple is fostering with its App Store, or shall we create web-based applications as Google and Palm recommends.
During the last MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco, Google predicted that the Web would prevail as the dominant mobile application development platform despite the huge success of Apple's App Store. But remember, Apple initially only officially allowed developers to create web-based applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, but one year later they extended access to native applications because web-based applications where too limited.
We should take into account that by the moment there is no Flash support in the iPhone, and without Flash, web-apps are too limited to be a serious competitor to native applications, in spite of Google claims that HTML5 (which allows CSS animations as well as the use of geolocation and accelerometers) is more than sufficient. No, it is not sufficient, HTML5 do not address the needs of more advanced games and applications that require access to mobile-based 3D services such as OpenGL ES.
From the point of view of the final user this debate is nonsense. What the users want is powerful, innovative and useful applications, and it does not matter where they come from, the web or the phone itself. From the point of view of the developer, we would like to “write once, run everywhere” (another Sun's motto), but that promise has not come yet.
For the future, our dream would be full-featured web-based applications with multi-device support. The Network is the Mobile Phone we could say. But the most probably outcome will be that native applications will win in the long term. Why? It's a matter of marketing, differentiation (an so incompatibility) is a strategic advantage for the corporations.
Sever vs. Clients, this is one of those issues that never seem to go away. Where we should store our data? And the applications we use? Is the Network the Computer, as Sun Microsystems' singular vision claims, and Google is preaching? Or everything should be keep safe in our personal computer, as Microsoft has been doing the last decades?
And the funny point is that the Severs vs. Clients war has arrived to our mobile phones. Why? Because smartphones have become highly capable computer terminals, with lots of memory, computing power, and connected to the Internet. So the debate is here: Where the applications should be? On the server side or stored in the phones themselves? Being more specific, shall we concentrate in developing native applications, as Apple is fostering with its App Store, or shall we create web-based applications as Google and Palm recommends.
During the last MobileBeat 2009 conference in San Francisco, Google predicted that the Web would prevail as the dominant mobile application development platform despite the huge success of Apple's App Store. But remember, Apple initially only officially allowed developers to create web-based applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, but one year later they extended access to native applications because web-based applications where too limited.
We should take into account that by the moment there is no Flash support in the iPhone, and without Flash, web-apps are too limited to be a serious competitor to native applications, in spite of Google claims that HTML5 (which allows CSS animations as well as the use of geolocation and accelerometers) is more than sufficient. No, it is not sufficient, HTML5 do not address the needs of more advanced games and applications that require access to mobile-based 3D services such as OpenGL ES.
From the point of view of the final user this debate is nonsense. What the users want is powerful, innovative and useful applications, and it does not matter where they come from, the web or the phone itself. From the point of view of the developer, we would like to “write once, run everywhere” (another Sun's motto), but that promise has not come yet.
For the future, our dream would be full-featured web-based applications with multi-device support. The Network is the Mobile Phone we could say. But the most probably outcome will be that native applications will win in the long term. Why? It's a matter of marketing, differentiation (an so incompatibility) is a strategic advantage for the corporations.
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