ITARC 2009 Presentation

I recently gave a talk on Re-thinking Software Architecture for Mobile platforms and it was very well received. What’s interesting is that most architects today keep ignoring the mobile space and think of it just as a new, shiny UI for the existing applications.

Unfortunately, however existing systems that were architected for web applications does not scale well to serve the requirements of multiple mobile clients.

In short here are some key points from the presentation:

1. Cloud computing is the key enabler of scaling architectures for new mobile solutions
2. User Experience is key when designing a mobile solution
3. Analyze your users, not all of them are on the same platform. Create different applications for different users instead of creating a monolithic applications with menus and options
4. Touch UI is a minimum requirement today
5. Responsiveness of the touch interface determines the usability of the application
6. Responsiveness on the client is achieved by introducing asynchronous client development
7. People who use your mobile solution will have short attention spans, break-down your workflows into smaller activities that can be completed within a couple of minutes
8. Limit the text input to a minimum, use selection based data entry as much as possible
9. Platform choice is key but some of the determining factors are: Internal/External Deployment, current skills of development team, market share of the platform, form factor and screen resolution of the target platform

Above points mostly talk about the client aspect of mobile development. The server aspects were covered in great detail during the presentation.