March 11th, 2008
The iPhone impact on open source
Even as an entirely proprietary platform the Apple iPhone is having a big impact on open source.
Apple’s huge and growing share of mobile data traffic, and its development choices, are now driving many corporate development choices.
Even those using open source.
“AJAX will be the way of the iPhone,” said Ben Sabrin, vice president of strategy at Appcelerator. “Steve Jobs says he will never support Flash and he sure won’t support Silverlight. The way forward is AJAX.”
This in turn is driving other forms of corporate development. “People want to deploy on multiple clients. They want to write the back-end once and deploy the same front-end,” Sabrin said. AJAX enables this.
In fairness, this trend goes right to Appcelerator’s sweet spot. CEO Jeff Haynie calls his an “RIA + SOA” company, whose tools build Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
But it also works in practice. Haynie said that Facebook on the iPhone is actually a richer environment than on a PC, because combining Asychronous Java And XML code (that’s AJAX) enables the creation of rich content with small data transfers.
“Enterprises understand how consumer interfaces have pushed out what we can do,” Haynie continued. “They see Google Finance, Google Maps, and sites like Flickr then ask why their own apps don’t do that.”
This year may be a turning point in Web development, as the decisions of mobile players begin to wag the desktop dog. Expect a lot of corporate interest in the choices made by the folks around Google’s Android.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 03/11/08
(nt)
