Pros and Cons of Client app development options
In this blog we will see all the pros and cons of client app developmetn options
Choosing
the Right Approach
In my previous blog, we saw the 3 development approaches for
mobile development:
1)
SAP Cloud Platform SDK
2)
Mobile Development Kit
3)
SAP Mobile Cards
Each of these things, these options, has pros and cons, and is good
for certain things.
SAP Cloud
Platform SDK – Native Development Approach
So the big pro for going native is that you have full control and
the best possible performance on a mobile device. This includes all the feature
set that is natively available to you when you development directly within the
platform. You have the look and feel of the platform
automatically and all the device features are at your fingertips.
This makes it good for applications that have a specific UX
requirement. So if you want to have a
video flying in from the right in your application, or a background video going
on, you'll want to have special animations, screen transitions. All these
things can be managed very easily in a native application.
Offline apps which you're using the whole day, are also very good
approach for going native.
So the required skills depend on the platform you are developing
for. You're typically either an iOS developer or Android developer. So for
Android, you probably would need Java or Kotlin language knowledge, or Kotlin
language knowledge, And for iOS, you would use Xcode, so the IDE knowledge, and
obviously Swift as the programming language.
Mobile
Development Kit
Mobile development kit is providing standardized look and feel,
but it's native. It also gives you a lot of predefined frameworks and screens
that simplify the app development. So it's very easy once you get started. And
it enforces user experience consistency. That means that all your apps look the
same. It's very good for applications that you see in enterprises, so where you
have lists of data, where you
manage data objects, where you modify those objects, start processes, and this
typical CRUD, This is what you would use the mobile development for.
It has been designed for offline applications, so it's also very
good for using offline applications. The skill set that you need for mobile
development kit are a bit typical, which I will be publishing in the coming
blogs. But also, you can leverage HTML skills, JavaScript, and style sheet
skills.
SAP Mobile Cards
Mobile cards is a very simple user experience and the user
experience is basically already set. So there's less or no coding that you need
to do You have a quick time to market.
And it's cross-platform and it integrates automatically into the underlying
operating system. So for instance, push notifications, you don't need to care,
it's already managed for you.
It's very good for functionally reduced micro-applications. So
data entry, for instance, of applications with multiple screens - this is not
what Mobile Cards is designed for. But if you want to see data and react to
data, and the data should come in proactively to the device, to the user, then
it's the right way to go for Mobile Cards. The required skill set is very
familiar to many, many developers.
So you need HTML, style sheets, and optionally JavaScript. You can
also create mobile Web applications, so basically Web sites that you render
nicely on a mobile device. This is OS-agnostic, it's very cost efficient. Has a
large device compatibility - that's no problem. It's very good for simple to
complex apps, towards the simple apps. It usually does not require offline
features or many native features, like push or others. But due to the progress
in recent years, mobile Web applications have been tremendously making steps
forward. So now you can, for instance, use barcode scanning in the application,
without having an Apache Cordova framework or similar things. The required
skill set here would be JavaScript, Web IDE for instance, UI5, maybe Apache
Cordova, maybe not. If you want to go for progressive Web
applications, you probably don't need that.
