SAP addressed its developer ecosystem this week by forming agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator, and Sencha to provide an open mobile application development framework on the company's own eponymously named mobile platform.
As application development environments, frameworks, and methodologies in the mobile space continue to evolve so rapidly, analysts at IDC have said that it is critical for enterprise mobile applications platforms like SAP's to support the most popular development environments used in the field.
With this triumvirate of collaboration now in place, the company is hoping that developers will view this as an opportunity to build mobile apps based on their particular choice of client architectures (from native, to hybrid web container, to mobile web) on top of the SAP mobile application platform.
"By joining forces with leading mobile app development vendors like Adobe, Appcelerator, and Sencha, we are making it easier for large communities of developers, in the millions, to innovate on our platform. We believe SAP is the only mobile platform provider delivering on the promise of an open platform architecture that supports innovative third-party development environments and tools, providing flexibility for customers to implement the right mobile app every time," said SAP's Sanjay Poonen.
Adobe: PhoneGap
PhoneGap is Adobe's hybrid web app runtime environment that allows developers to author native mobile applications with web technologies such as HTML5. Applications built with PhoneGap have access to native device APIs and can be published across all major app stores.
Appcelerator: Titanium Development Platform
Appcelerator's Titanium is an Eclipse-based IDE, SDK, and library of connectors. For mobile development, Titanium Studio provides a development framework to connect apps to SAP and 220 other data sources. The Titanium SDK is suited to native, hybrid, and mobile web apps all from a single JavaScript code base. Appcelerator says 300,000 mobile developers make up its current programming family.
Sencha: Touch
Sencha Touch 2 is an HTML5 mobile application framework for apps that work on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Kindle Fire, and elsewhere. Its makers say that Sencha Touch includes interactive HTML5 charting, newly delivered support for the oData protocol, as well as built-in capabilities that make it easy to build applications that align with business architectures.
"To create innovative mobile apps, every company must leverage the creativity and capabilities of in-house developers and millions of developers in the wider mobile ecosystem," said SAP's Poonen. "With our 'Mobile 2.0' strategy, we are opening up our unified platform to capture all the innovation that is possible in the mobile world."
