There is no arguing that the world has turned mobile. I
believe that it is time for application developers to adopt a mobile-first
mentality. In this post I’m going to outline what I believe that means, and how
Zend intends to help developers and companies make mobile first a reality.
A mobile first approach is essential as mobile devices (including
tablets) are quickly becoming the most popular access point for online
interactions. A mobile-first mindset focuses on delivering a strong contextual
and personalized experience. It embraces touch, puts the user experience at the center and sets
apps up to reach 100% of the mobile audience.
One of the most critical design principles of mobile first
is that context is essential to today’s application development. In today’s
mobile-first era, consumers, employees and partners want to take action in real
time and base their decisions on the best actionable personalized information. Businesses
want to engage customers in real time, because companies know that their
ability to influence behavior increases significantly if they can meet their
users in context. That context may include location, social graph, user profile
and many other data points. For example, offers for a mortgage or car loan are
most effective when delivered to a consumer at the exact point they are house
or car shopping.
API-centric cloud services architecture
We believe the best architecture to support a mobile first
paradigm is a REST/JSON-based, API-centric cloud services approach. The brain
of the application sits on the server side and pulls together a variety of data
sources which build the context and personalization for the app. PHP is ideally
suited for this, as it has strong interoperability into existing enterprise
systems and social platforms. PHP is also highly productive, and enables the
agile development approach required to deliver iterative application value – a key
requirement for user-centric development.
Cloud as the delivery vehicle
In mobile-first architectures, the cloud becomes the
preferred delivery vehicle. The unpredictability of scale and latency in the mobile
world require application platforms that can scale up and scale down on demand.
In addition, the user-driven and iterative design approach of a mobile-first paradigm
puts increased pressure on organizations to implement agile operations that
enable them to frequently and incrementally deploy updated mobile apps. Cloud
automation and application platforms best enable agile delivery and operations.
Finally, contextual applications will access an increasing amount of SaaS
applications and social platforms. The need for the integration of a variety of
public cloud services will drive the runtime platforms into the cloud. We
already see this trend emerging with cloud-based offerings by a variety of
integration players.
UI logic moves to the client
On the front end, the experience needs to be tailored to the
mobile device’s form factor and its native interaction paradigm. To enable a great
user experience, the UI logic needs to move from the server side to the client side.
The client-side UI logic focuses on delivering the right interaction paradigm
while communicating with the server side for data access and processing via REST/JSON
calls.
Mobile drives adoption of cloud
Mobile and cloud are increasingly interlinked and
co-dependent. Market-wise, looking at the IT vendor landscape, there are
companies that have made great progress in enabling mobile client development
solutions; others have made significant progress in enabling the delivery of
cloud services at scale. I believe many are making the mistake of seeing cloud
and mobile as separate and their strategies reflect that. Others get that the
two should work together, but these companies are too big to truly deliver a
holistic solution; in such organizations, artificial org chart boundaries exist
between end user computing and data center groups.
At Zend, we believe mobile and cloud are so interdependent
that vendors who address one and not the other leave their customers short. We are
stepping up to the challenge and are delivering on an end-to-end solution to
make it easier to build these next generation cloud-connected mobile
applications.
Zend’s solution to building cloud-connected mobile
applications spans from client to cloud. Some of the key elements include:
-
Easy drag and drop creation
of cloud services
-
An open cloud application
platform that enables deployment to any cloud
-
Strong Web standards-based
client-side tooling
Easy drag and drop creation of cloud services
In Zend Studio, we enable customers to visually assemble cloud
services (a.k.a. APIs). The visual tooling is built on Zend Server Gateway, an
API gateway. Zend Server Gateway is lightweight, enables authentication,
filtering and validation, and a variety of other capabilities. We are investing
in Zend Server Gateway to continue to round out its capabilities and ensure it
is an easy and flexible way to build and deliver cloud services. Zend Studio
also enables the connecting of these cloud services to the client- side UI in a
very easy manner (see more below).
An open cloud application platform that enables
deployment to any cloud
As mentioned earlier, the scalability and agility benefits
of cloud make it the most appropriate back end delivery vehicle for a mobile-first
strategy. Zend Server is pre-integrated with a variety of clouds including
Amazon, RackSspace, VMware, IBM, Red Hat OpenShift and others. And we intend to
continue to add additional support clouds, including Windows Azure and Google.
These cloud integrations enable one-click launch of our elastic
PHP Cloud application platform. In order to meet the latency, scale and SLA
requirements of cloud-connected mobile apps, Zend Server delivers fault
tolerance, performance management, monitoring and alerting, and high
performance. We also enable effective communication between development and
operations departments via role-based access and automation, fostering a strong,
agile, collaborative environment.
Strong Web standards-based client-side tooling
At Zend, we believe that open Web standards will end up
dominating the client side. While today Objective-C on iOS and Java on Android are
the norm, there is no doubt that HTML5 & JavaScript will unify mobile
application development, just like they unified Web development for the desktop.
There is much innovation going on around HTML5 and mobile devices, including
significant investments in performance. So while it may not seem so today, it
is only a matter of time before Web technologies will be in the lead. As a
result, we have fully embraced HTML5 & JavaScript, and have deepened our
commitment to these technologies in Zend Studio, our professional PHP IDE.
We have also integrated Apache Cordova (a.k.a. Phonegap) into
our tooling experience. This will enable our customers to leverage open web standards
technologies to build applications that have access to native device
capabilities, such as the camera on a variety of OSs, including iOS, Android
and Windows Phone. Applications packaged with Apache Cordova can also be
distributed through the app stores. Therefore, you get all the distribution
model benefits while being able to easily target multiple devices with your
in-house Web developers.
What you see is what you get. Tooling saves time by giving
you the ability to quickly put together mobile prototypes that may have taken
days to develop manually. The visual drag and drop tooling generates standard
HTML5 and jQuery Mobile, so the output can easily be understood and modified by
all Web developers.
Developers can easily test their mobile applications using
the provided Web mobile emulator. Integration with Android Development Toolkit
(ADT), xCode (iOS) and Visual Studio (Windows Phone) enables a native emulator
or target device experience, accessible directly from the Zend Studio IDE.
In summary, Zend is committed to supporting your entrance
into the new era of contextual applications, where mobile is cloud and cloud is mobile. We believe we have a unique
capability to deliver a complete, highly productive, yet enterprise-proven
solution to address the requirements of building and running business-critical,
cloud-connected mobile applications. And we do this without locking you into
any specific cloud or mobile device. Sound too good to be true? Give it a try!
