Russell Beattie comments on the importance of wireless application development tools designed for everyday corporate developers. Microsoft gets this, but Nokia, Motorola, Sun and most other big wireless players don't.
At my company, JumpStart Wireless, anyone who can create a spreadsheet can also create wireless applications. This spreadsheet approach to wireless applications works with any application that can be captured as a set of business forms. Once a form is described, the application is automatically generated using artificial intelligence technology. (an overview here, email me for more technical details). The form description is created by working with a customer's existing paper forms and studying how those paper forms are actually used.
I'm sure there are other simplified approaches as well. Instead of launching yet another Java framework standardization effort, the wireless software community should be actively seeking easy-to-use alternatives to Visual Basic and the .Net Compact Framework.
The tools to be developed must be much easier to use than C++ and the current complex Java programming environments. Russell makes the point that when
a slick marketing driven company like Microsoft comes in with a click-click-click demo of how easy it is to create mobile apps with their .Net toolsets, CTOs are going to sign on the bottom line.He is absolutely right.
No matter how many GUI tools you pack around it, and how many frameworks you design, C++, is just too complicated for most programmers and certainly not suited to typical corporate applications.
Microsoft, with their initiatives around Visual Basic and .Net Compact Framework, has the right idea. Visual Basic and the approaches around it have been well designed for simple "one-off" applications. Even though that approach does not scale well and mostly does not produce reusable code, it is enormously easy to teach and use.
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