Software application development

If you find yourself looking up a vendor on ZDNet.co.uk and notice that the bulk of the content you can get your hands are links to white papers rather than news or opinion, you might (if you are like me) want to learn more.

Acision is not a name most of us are familiar with, but this may be due to the fact that the brand itself emanated from the bowels of LogicaCMG’s telecoms products business, which was sold off to a consortium of investment firms last year. Acision now works with partners across the global communications industry to create and market new applications and services.

Aside from its worryingly bland somewhat overstated marketing label as, “the world’s leading messaging company,” the company appears to be filling Logica’s SMS-powered boots pretty well and has formed the Acision Innovation Network to bring comms companies together to collaborate on the creation and marketing of new apps and services.

Now that’s all well and good if you’re happy to feed on corporate gloss alone. But only yesterday I was discussing the state of mobile application development strategies in advance of a conference I am attending next week with Nick Jones who is a VP & distinguished analyst at Gartner.

I asked Jones if all the open sourcing and opening up to partner collaboration in the mobile space means that it’s all still about handset domination at the end of the day. “No, it’s all about ecosystem domination,” he said. He has a point though, this is a global power play for sure for many of these companies.

Acision isn’t in this for charity and openly states that it is developing and commercialising new applications and services while building, “Successful collaborations and innovations to create a sales pipeline of tens of millions (US$) in sectors including messaging, mobile broadband, charging, mobile marketing, m-payments and social networking.”

I will come back to Gartner’s Jones next week who has some good insight to share. So what is it that they say? All power corrupts; but absolute power corrupts absolutely. Shouldn’t that be all power corrupts; but absolute power in the mobile application development space is kinda cool?

There was a time, about five years ago to be exact, when Palm held developer press briefings in London and furrowed a relatively deep channel of respect as one of the vanguards of the mobile app revolution. They would talk about developer challenges for ‘squeezing into’ the mobile space and really get down to the guts of demonstrating how fast simple forms-based apps could be produced.

Without worrying too much about little things like the iPhone, Palm has of course rolled with the good and bad over this last half decade and now perhaps keeps a little quieter overall.

But as application-aware as I would like to claim that I am, I have not installed much on my ageing Treo as it is my second unit to suffer from horrendous screen degradation and pixel-sprawl (as I like to call it). Or my third if you count (or can remember) the Palm Tungsten.

Interesting then to see recent ZDNet.co.uk news detailing the company’s approach to its WebOS platform and the fact it will drop programme fees for open-source developers. Anytime you hear a major manufacturer say they are offering an, “unparalleled level of transparency,” are you not slightly suspicious?

Is this not Palm trying to piggyback on existing web-based application delivery channels to aid the general proliferation of its user base? Well that’s good business sense, so what’s wrong with that I suppose?

But it’s a win-win for Palm with minimal investment isn’t it? Just what are they giving back? The company’s developer programme framework will provide, “feedback on early stages of development,” for fledgling projects. Great, so what? By and large, all we hear from Palm is money-focused messages – there’s no, “hey, use our lab resources and take a look at some of the following tutorials,” is there? If there is, I’ve missed it so sorry.

Instead, Palm concentrates on telling us about “monetising the delivery of valuable applications,” to Palm customers and the, “70/30 split (developer/Palm) split of gross revenues,” that developers get from application sales.

I see one line that makes note of the programme including crash logs and information on application usage. Other than that, we’re straight back into info on how to be considered for the illustrious Palm App Catalogue.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Palm – after all, why would I have stuck with such a badly malfunctioning machine for so long? I think the build quality is actually really solid and I like the GUI. I also love Astraware’s superb Palm games and some of the retro 80s freeware stuff.

But this week’s news has too commercially tinged for my liking. Palm clearly has the technical guts under the bonnet to help developers make their apps zing, so why do they focus so heavily on commercialisation and distribution?

Money talks and BS walks I guess.

Sometimes I get the feeling that online diagnostic & assessment tools of any kind are about as intuitive and insightful as one of those fairground, “place your finger on the pad to get your ‘sexy’ rating,” machines. I mention this only because I have been signed up for my local council’s resident awareness scheme, which sees me fill out a 25-question survey twice a year to rate my opinions on graffiti and crime.

Do they really ‘steer’ the management of my local Surrey council based upon people’s randomly clicked answers to poorly composed questions with impersonal answer options in the style of a) a lot b) somewhat c) often d) rarely e) never etc..? I hope they don’t take our answers as gospel.

Actually, the other reason for mentioning this is that I blogged last month on opinions that still circulate over the use of Agile computing. Mainly put about by those that consult, sell or generally hang off the coat tails of some vendor who specialises in Agile, the door for debate is still open for some – although I fear some of you are becoming weary of this interminable deliberation?

Tie the above points together and guess what you get? Bingo! Online diagnostics and analysis tools for first stage assessment to examine the potential for a project’s move to Agile adoption. You couldn’t write this stuff could you?

But who would sell such a thing? A “global leader” in Agile ALM tools and training would of course. But mercifully ThoughtWorks Studios does in fact make its web-based 20-question diagnostic free for us to try.

Covering both management and engineering practices, this “customized” report (surely its only as customised as the customer makes it) with high-level (really?) analysis that highlights potential areas for improvement is available here should you so wish to indulge.

The quiz (sorry – the online in depth high-level diagnostic tool) is described by its originators as a, “10-minute investment well worth the time.” Saracasm aside, ThoughtWorks does say that it has based its questions on 16-years of hands on practical experience.

The Agile Assessment covers: requirements analysis, business responsiveness, collaboration and communication, project management and governance – and also engineering practices such as build management, configuration management and testing.

It’s extremely easy to be critical of something like this. For my part, if I had had to sell it to customers or the press – I would have taken a more human approach. OK yes, it’s a drop in ocean perhaps. It’s only a 10-minute online tool.

But if you had high-blood pressure or needed to fix your bath plumbing where is the first place you would look? It would have to be Yellow Pages, Thompson Local directories, under the bed, the Encyclopedia Britannica or Google? My money is on the web. It’s a first step, but more crucially I feel, it’s a first natural step – and that is how they should have positioned it.

Right – must fill in online council survey now and give my opinions on new wheelie bin collection systems.

If there’s one thing that recent ZDNet reviews of Microsoft Office Web Apps is likely to leave you thinking about, it should be collaboration. With this in mind, I noticed this week’s news from online enterprise collaboration player Huddle.net purporting that its new iPhone app and web conferencing offerings put the company head-to-head with WebEx, Lotus and Box.net.

Well, although I know WebEx works pretty well as I have a client who uses it often, the company is usually ranked somewhere in the deep left bottom ‘oh yuk – don’t touch’ quarter of the Gartner magic quadrant for these technologies. Lotus I was force fed for two years when I worked for an IBM supplier and I’ve been thankfully free of it ever since. NB: I know it’s powerful and well built, but it’s just painful for most of us isn’t it? Finally, Box.net – I have to confess I don’t know well enough to comment on. So hardly a glowing set of three to go head-to-head against is it?

What Huddle does do well is provide a hosted suite of live tools in a single app – and because it’s a pretty thoroughbred web 2.0 beast, it offers features like unlimited users for free so that it can scale from small teams to large enterprise deployments for a comparatively low cost.

But integration with Microsoft Office, wouldn’t you have expected them to have provided that before now wouldn’t you? I guess not, perhaps that's why Microsoft has tried so hard to do what Google docs never quite seemed to be able to pull off with its new baby. What users obviously want is the ability to use collaboration tools to access documents stored online directly from their desktop applications and this is the direction that both Huddle and Microsoft are pushing for.

Huddle in fact has been working with that large software company on the US far North West cost more closely than you might think. “Through the Microsoft BizSpark program, Huddle has been able to leverage a variety of tools and technologies including Microsoft Office to create a better experience for their customers,” said Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of Emerging Business Development at Microsoft.

No misspelling – he really does use an apostrophe in his name.

As well as web conferencing that integrates directly with your Outlook or Google calendar (I don’t use either so I’m not sure why this is a sales plug), Huddle says that its price is currently the lowest available on the market and that it can be also accessed on other cell phones by using third party applications such as Clustr if you so wish – and its iPhone app offers, “Access to document sharing, project tasks, discussions and whiteboards, as well as a complete view of the user's personalised dashboard.”

This all sounds superb, I just wish I could afford an iPhone so I could try some of this stuff. I do think that this is interesting news to follow though and I’ll tell you why. Travelling a huge amount as I do, I am constantly playing with a mix of netbook, oversized MacBook Pro and an ageing Palm Treo as I desperately search for free WiFi hotspots from Surrey to Mauritania. Once this web 2.0 type of technology finally comes of age I will gladly buy in to it. I need to be better connected. For now though, I’ll take a slightly sceptical backseat if it’s all the same to you folks.

How many ways can you repackage the concept of metadata, or information about information? Well for starters, if you are Gartner you can coin the term context-aware computing just about any time you like. Even better, you can go on to explain that this is, “The concept of leveraging information about the end-user to improve the quality of the interaction.”

The worthy scribes in the hallowed halls and vestibules of Gartner’s venerable research operation have concluded that emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes and other environmental information to anticipate an end user's immediate needs.

OK, so we already know that every CRM system worth its salt out there is monitoring what day of the week we buy our bananas on and feeding this all into Deep Thought’s bottomless database of tracking data. So what’s the big deal?

According to Gartner, “By 2012, the typical Global 2000 company will be managing between two and ten business relationships with context providers and by 2015, context will be as influential in mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the web.”

Just when I was beginning to get won over by this argument and think, ‘hey, maybe user-context data is not on the average developer’s radar to the degree it should be’ - they kind of spoiled it a bit by calling it a ‘game changing disruptive technology’. OK guys; just turn down the contrast control just a touch will you please?

As with many of these press-facing statements, you don’t get to the meat until you’ve already filled yourself up on the sweet doughy bread-based coating. Gartner does recognise that many organisations are already employing some context-enriched services today and although many are relatively sophisticated, they tend to be fairly disparate implementations. Perhaps this is where developers (or IT project managers at least) can step in and build greater awareness of these concepts.

Gartner’s Anne Lapkin has noted that, “Location-based services, presence and portal personalisation are common, if simple, manifestations of context today. Many organisations are beginning to experiment with social networking, which can also provide significant context information as well as use context information to achieve better results. By 2011, Type A organisations (technology aggressive) will begin to integrate multiple contextual components to provide a richer user experience that enables top-line growth as well as workplace efficiencies.”

I wish they’d said that to start with, but I suppose you have to start with a bit of razzmatazz. While I’ve been somewhat cheap and glib in my notes here, it is only right and proper to recognise that Gartner is no bunch of amateurs and the research that exists for you to read on this subject is extensive, should you choose to go looking for it.

I think it probably comes down to what type of developer you are. If you have a commercial mind and want to explore further how the processes and functions that you are building will impact the business bottom line – then this could well be for you. If you are a more compartmentalised programmer with your own specific tasks, then maybe not so much.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on the Gartner Special Report, “Context-Aware Computing: A Looming Disruption” then there’s your link.