Tim King's presentation at Apps World 2012. Dr Tim King is the CTO of 5app. In this talk he discusses some of the issues that developers of mobile enterprise apps face today.

1. Mobile App Development
- the new Wild West
Dr Tim King
CTO

2. Anyone can make an app
Web designers Script kiddies
Global software companies Dodgy East Europeans

3. … badly
• 650,000 apps in Apple app store
• 400,000 apps never downloaded
• 1,899 flashlight apps
• Maybe 2,000 useful apps
The vast majority of these apps are D-list in design and implementation
Are the developers of these apps the people you
want to create a cross-platform enterprise app?

4. Mobile communications
• Not like WAN and LAN
– Which is probably all many people have met
– TCP/IP provides reliable link between two IP addresses
• IP address alters
– New PDP context => new IP address
– PDP timeout ensures IP addresses are not wasted
– Switches between WiFi and mobile
• Unreliable connection
– Signal comes and goes (tunnels, Wales… )

5. Traps for the unwary
But it works fine
connected to WiFi back
at the office when I
“tested” it.
Well if you don’t have a reliable connection change your operator
• AJAX does not work
– Retransmit on failure
– Remove duplicates
• Push is hard
– When an app is in the background it stops
– Different in all OS flavours

6. 5app cross-platform solution
Store and forward
communication
library
Continuous Automatic Continuous
interaction sync when interaction
possible
Device Interchange
Developer writes in HTML, CSS and Javascript in online Factory
API to create and manipulate data, which is transferred as soon as possible
Retry and de-dup built in to both sides
Data change events raised when synchronisation occurs on device and interchange

7. Understanding Communications
fiveApp.com