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.

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.

Industry leaders give developers and IT managers their best advice on questions surrounding network access by mobile devices.

Written by Chris Smith

Mobile devices and applications seem to be sweeping the world and are presenting special challenges—and rewards—for developers. As users come to expect access to corporate networks and applications from their mobile devices, developers will be tasked with weighing in on how their companies should approach this challenge.

Industry leaders weigh in on questions surrounding deployment of mobile devices and applications within the enterprise.

Written by Chris Smith

The world is going mobile, and chances are that everyone reading this article has a smartphone, and probably has—or is planning to get—a tablet computer, be it an iPad, Android, Windows 7, or BlackBerry device.

The implications for enterprise computing are, if not enormous, at least extremely significant. No IT manager or chief technology officer today can claim to be completely confident in his or her decisions regarding mobile enterprise computing because the technology is changing so fast.

Take advantage of tablet-based devices in a System i world.

Written by Mike Faust

According to a USA Today article from December of 2010, 21 million tablet PCs were sold in 2010. Most of those sales were as a result of Apple's introduction of the iPad. Tablet devices like the Apple iPad are often thought of as high-tech "toys" used for simple tasks like playing games, sending email, Web surfing, or maybe watching a movie or listening to music. But the real power of these devices that's often overlooked is the potential of using them as business tools. Specifically, I believe these devices are well-suited for use in the System i world. This article explores a few of the options for using tablets with the System i.