Mobile, cloud are changing application development.

Mobile and cloud computing are beginning to change the way that developers work at enterprise-level and smaller businesses, according to a report released this week by Forrester Research.

The report, entitled "The State of Application Development in Enterprises and SMBs," also found that the use of development technologies such as HTML5 is becoming more prominent, although Java and .Net still dominate. The report presents findings from various surveys of 933 decision makers and about 2,500 developers in North America and Europe.
"Mobile development exploded in 2010 and will continue to expand in importance in 2011," said the report, which was authored by analyst Jeffrey Hammond with assistance from analysts Mike Gilpin and Adam Knoll. "But the types of mobile applications that developers are building are evolving."
According to the report, customer-facing applications constitute the most frequently developed mobile applications, with 51 percent of decision makers building or planning these. Thirty-nine percent of development shops are mobilizing employee intranets, and 29 percent are readying mobile collaboration software. Fifty-one percent of respondents are most interested in using mobile application development or mobile-optimized websites to reach customers.
Most mobile developers plan to target iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad -- roughly 56 percent and 36 percent, respectively -- while Google Android was targeted by 50 percent of mobile developers. Windows Mobile and RIM remained popular, but Symbian development was chosen by only 8 percent of respondents, the analysts said.
Overall, in-house developers anchor most mobile application development efforts, with nearly 80 percent of shops planning to use their own people.

In the cloud space, one in eight development organizations has deployed applications in the cloud, according to the Forrester report. High-tech manufacturers, such as computer hardware manufacturers and consumer electronics firms, are most likely to deploy applications to the cloud (24 percent), although services firms are also aggressive adopters at 19 percent. Developers at health care companies seldom use the cloud today, with less than 5 percent developing, testing, or deploying cloud applications.




source:http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/mobile-cloud-are-changing-application-development-915