Let's examine what needs to be taken into consideration when designing, developing, and managing business applications for mobile devices.

Written by Richard Lancaster

These days almost everyone has a mobile device, ranging from iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, or Windows phones to tablets such as Apple iPad, Motorola Xoom, or Samsung Galaxy. How do you design mobile applications, and what tools do developers need? Will the existing methodology for application life cycle management be adequate for mobile applications? This article is a primer on designing, developing, and managing business applications for mobile devices and suggests issues to consider.

Planning to build mobile apps? Then you need to be clear on what HTML5 is and is not.

Written by Joe Pluta

If you've been even tangentially involved with Web development over the past year or so, you're more than likely familiar with the term "HTML5." Yet HTML5 is surrounded by a whole lot of confusion and misinformation. This quick tip will sort some of it out for you.

Emerging industry standards and platform and partner integrations make mobile video conferencing across heterogeneous networks a distinct possibility in 2012.

Written by Chris Smith

The promise of unified communications has been omnipresent for many years, but the missing piece to make it tantalizing to the masses and push its appeal into the category of a "must have" for smaller companies has been video. Today, the video element is being tested for prime time, and companies likely will begin rolling out secure inter-enterprise video communication services sometime in 2012.

A new version of what has become a rapid application development (RAD) environment creates a single app that can run on virtually any platform, including a variety of mobile devices.

Written by Chris Smith

The demand for mobile applications and the fact that there are multiple SDKs for the different platforms—including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile—is creating significant extra work for developers and IT shops. With most mobile device manufacturers now basing their browsers on the open-source WebKit engine, however, building native apps for each of the mobile platforms may not be necessary. A hybrid application based on HTML5 and CSS3 will run on any mobile device whose browser is built on WebKit. Most today are, which means if you build one application, it will work across all mobile platforms.

New technologies, capacity challenges, and security threats put network managers at the center of one of the most challenging roles in IT.

Written by Chris Smith

As with many areas of IT, network technology is evolving at a rapid pace. New networking initiatives extend from foundational technologies to a host of emerging ones, involving the full spectrum of routing, switching, WAN management, unified communications, LANs, wireless, network systems management and administration, mobility, and, of increasing importance, security.

Embarcadero's newly updated visual development environment could simplify both mobile and Web development.

Written by Chris Smith

One of the attendees in the IBM i track of the ZendCon conference last month expressed frustration in building PHP Web applications when it came to mastering elements handled by JavaScript, HTML, CSS3, and other art forms. Using various tools, frameworks, and IDEs allowed his team back home to get just so far, he said. Then things started to slow down. I realized that he probably was at the conference to learn how to get his crew back on track.

Despite longtime promises that virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI) is ready for broad adoption, companies have been wary of moving too quickly into uncharted waters.

Written by Chris Smith

The concept of a virtual desktop has been gaining appeal among technology managers for the past several years, but for various reasons virtual desktops haven't been broadly adopted. Recent advances in technology, along with the advent of cloud computing and a faster Internet, have finally come together to create an environment that may finally make the virtual desktop a reality across the enterprise. Virtual desktop infrastructure, or VDI, has been gaining traction in just the past year at an accelerated pace.

It's true! You can have 5250 emulation for the Mac and Linux (and Windows too)!

Written by Mike Faust

As an avid Mac user, one of my primary challenges when switching from a Windows-based PC to a Mac is finding a suitable replacement for the Client Access default Telnet client. While many commercial Telnet client products are available for the Mac, one open-source option caught my attention. In this tip, I'd like to spend some time reviewing the TN5250J project and what it has to offer.