About the Telerik Platform
Let’s face it, the technological landscape in our organizations is no longer a sea of Windows-only PC’s and a single standard internet browser. We have to deal with differing operating systems, mobile phones as well as tablets in our work environments. Enterprise mobility has quickly become a critical issue in every organization, seemingly overnight. While all of these shifts in technology are exciting and compelling, it sure does make application development a difficult task.
The Telerik Platform was designed to ease many of the common pain points experienced in larger organizations, especially where cross-platform and mobile application development are concerned. The Telerik Platform is a flexible, enterprise-ready end-to-end modular application development solution.
Some of the pain points solved with the Telerik Platform are:
- A modular architecture with no vendor lock-in
- Cross-platform mobile application development
- Cut hardware costs with device emulators and cloud builds
- Streamlined mobile application packaging and deployment
- Version control and project collaboration
- Mobile UI Testing framework
- Supporting Backend Service tier
Modular - No Vendor Lock-In
One thing to keep in mind while we review some of the finer points of the platform, is that you are not required to use only the Telerik products mentioned here. The Telerik Platform has been built in such a way that it integrates well with third party products that you may already be using. For instance, if you are using a very cool JavaScript framework that you absolutely love, by all means, keep using it! Same thing goes for backend services, data storage, testing and analytics products. However, it is worth your time to try out the Telerik Platform end-to-end so that you can witness for yourself just how powerful our tools work together. When you take advantage of the platform, you will see that it will save you a great deal of time and frustration, and in the end you will be able deliver a cross-platform, native, or web application that you can easily test and monitor with analytics.
Mobile UI Development in the Enterprise
Mobile application development for enterprise organizations can prove to be costly and time consuming. While building native applications usually works for companies like Facebook, the reality is that for most enterprises, the story is much more complex. You need to familiarize yourself with each of the development platforms, such as Windows Phone, BlackBerry, iOS and Android. In addition to this, you also need to learn and become proficient with their associated development environments and programming languages. Further, as an enterprise, you don't build just one app; you build lots of apps. Creating a native solution for each one may just not make very much sense.
In order to trim costs it seems logical to look toward building a mobile web solution. One main benefit of this approach is that you have a single solution that can be consumed by all devices, all the while utilizing the HTML and JavaScript skillsets that you already possess. Many times, this solution is perfectly suited most needs. Whether it's mobile web, or responsive design, Telerik provides Kendo UI Mobile and Kendo UI. These mobile first frameworks facilitate the next generation of mobile web apps.
Building for the web does came with a trade-off though, you no longer have access to device capabilities, such as the cameras and sensors, and you also miss out on using device specific API’s. Mobile devices are capable of so much more than just displaying data. Depending on your business, you also reduce visibility and potential income from your application as web applications are not published to app stores.Hybrid application development has been introduced to bridge the gap between these two solutions. With a hybrid application, you can take advantage of the single codebase using the familiar HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills that are very prominent in enterprise developers today. At the same time, hybrid applications can deliver access to the device hardware and device API’s. On top if this, hybrid applications can be packaged and deployed to prominent app stores.Please note that all three approaches listed above are valid solutions depending on your requirements, the Telerik Platform supports them all. Because the platform is modular, you can easily develop applications natively using any technology such as ASP.NET, WPF, Windows Phone and more and still be able to integrate them with other Telerik Platform services.
Leveraging the Telerik Platform for Building Hybrid Mobile Applications
AppBuilder
You can leverage the Telerik Platform the most by developing a hybrid mobile application.
AppBuilder, formerly known as Icenium is provided to you through the
unified Telerik Platform Portal. You have the option to build your application with this cloud based UI within the portal itself and benefit from the ability to access your projects anytime, anywhere. Alternatively, you may choose to download a
Windows client IDE, install the
Visual Studio extension, or leverage the command line interface (coming soon) and use your favorite IDE. Regardless of the approach you choose, the same platform SDK's and services are available for you to use as you need them.
Mobile Emulators and Physical Devices
AppBuilder provides a multitude of browser-based emulators straight out of the box. You can choose to view your application on various Android or iOS phones or tablets easily accessed from within the IDE. You no longer have to have your hands on physical devices to test your applications out. Since these emulators are web browser based, you can use the familiar Chrome developer tools to debug and profile your application.
On the flip-side, if you wanted to test your applications on a physical device, you have the ability to do without actually provisioning the device. For iOS, this feature comes courtesy of the
AppBuilder Companion Application. You have the ability to live update your code with your device using a simple three finger touch gesture.
Application Packaging and Deployment
Packaging and deploying mobile applications manually can be a hassle. Luckily the Telerik Platform provides
integrated packaging and deployment of your hybrid applications. You have the ability to deploy to app stores directly from within the Telerik Portal.
Version Control and Project Collaboration
Once you start developing your application, you’ll be relieved to know that version control is also a feature of the Telerik Platform. If you are working alone, by default your projects will utilize the integrated AppBuilder version control cloud services. If you are collaborating on a project with multiple developers, you also have the ability to utilize a GitHub repository.
Inviting collaborating members to a project is easy through the Telerik Platform Portal.
Mobile Testing
Telerik Mobile Testing is an intuitive plain language testing framework. Tests are coded in JavaScript and executed via a Node.js server running on the development machine. With great
supporting documentation, and downloadable samples for Android, iOS and Web projects, you will be cranking out tests for your application use cases in no time at all. Your test results can be seamlessly reported back to the Telerik Platform and where your team can view test results in a rich visual dashboard.
Sample Applications
Speed up development by taking advantage of the many
AppBuilder sample applications that are sure to boost your productivity. These samples cover many common use cases, including push notifications, user management, hardware sensor interaction, social media integration and so much more.
Backend Services
Utilizing
Telerik Backend Services can also save you vast amounts of development time. You can choose from many ready-made services to store and retrieve your custom content types and files. Simply define your content types and/or files and go! No need to write a REST service for your data or worry about authentication and user management. Telerik Backend Services automatically expose content via RESTful interfaces and a simple API with integrated security. Full editor support is also available to edit your data directly within the Telerik Portal, for instance, edit GeoPoint data with Google Maps, Date fields will use a Kendo UI DatePicker widget and a JSON field will provide you with a fully featured JSON editor.
Telerik Backend Services also provide you the ability to handle common mobile application requirements. These include a fully featured user management service, third party login providers (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Active Directory), as well as the implementation of push notification services for multiple platforms allowing you to push a single notification while the platform takes care of targeting the different operating systems.
By downloading any of the AppBuilder sample applications you will also gain insight into the Backend Services to support them.
It is also an important note that Telerik Backend Services can be leveraged by any native client. If you want to bring any of these helpful services to any native-built client you can get a head start by downloading samples and SDK’s from the Downloads section of the Backend Services module.
Application Analytics
Once an application has been released to users, a developer’s visibility into the application is limited. You rely on word of mouth and trouble tickets to identify how your application is being used and to be notified of any problems that arise. That is unless you are using application analytics. The Telerik Platform offers
Telerik Analytics that you can use to measure feature usage, performance and exception occurrences as well as tracking other metadata such as operating systems, user geography, application version and more. Telerik Analytics has a configurable dashboard visible within the Telerik Portal that gives you a quick glance at the overall health and usage of your application while giving you comprehensive data visualization so that you can view and dissect the data from any angle.
Wrapping Up
The Telerik Platform was built to make mobile development in enterprise organizations faster and easier. The topics covered in this article just scratch the surface of the many capabilities of this platform.
I recommend you give the Telerik Platform a try by
initiating a trial that gives you full access to all the platform has to offer. After 30 days, your account will switch to the free Starter Edition that you can continue to use indefinitely for up to 5 users and 2 projects.
To find out more about the Telerik Platform,
register to attend the launch keynote on February 12th, 2014.