News

Red Hat Wraps Mobile Dev Platform in Modern Tech

• By David Ramel
• October 14, 2016

Red Hat Inc. ticked off all the modern tech keywords in announcing its enhanced mobile app development platform.

Containerization? Check. Cloud native? Check. Microservices-based? Check. API-driven? Check. Agile and DevOps support? Check.

They're all present and accounted for in the new Red Hat Mobile Application Platform, which is now fully containerized with Docker-based technology in a move to the company's container infrastructure. That allows it to run on any cloud or on-premises implementations that support the company's enterprise Linux distribution.

"The move to a fully containerized platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, based on docker-format containers and Kubernetes, is part of Red Hat's strategy to provide a single, integrated platform for modern application development that is cloud native, mobile-centric, microservices-based and API-driven," the company said in a statement yesterday. "This new generation of app development tools also support DevOps and agile processes to help businesses innovate and respond to the ever-changing needs of the digital enterprise."

The platform provides a bring-your-own-tools approach, letting developers pick their own native SDKs, toolkits, frameworks, programming languages and so on, with a Cloud Build Service supporting the development of native and hybrid apps targeting the iOS, Android and Windows Phone OSes.

And, in yet another nod to the low-code/no-code movement that's rapidly growing to let organizations proceed with mobility initiatives in the face of a mobile skills shortage, it features drag-and-drop dev tools that the company said obviate "the need for coding skills."

To help those folks along -- in addition to developers who know how to code -- the platform provides Mobile Back-end-as-a-Service (MBaaS) to hook into server-side functionality via RESTful APIs and microservices.

"The server side, based on Node.js, offers a lightweight, event-driven I/O model that is suited to data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices," the platform's site says. "Developers can access Node.js modules, via the Node community, to create back-end services that can be shared and reused across mobile projects. For example, developers can access modules for integration with common back-end systems such as Salesforce, SharePoint and Oracle."

Red Hat said its enhanced mobile dev platform, along with its existing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based mobile app platform, provides developers with more deployment options to fulfill enterprise mobility initiatives.

The use of cutting-edge technologies reflects the future of mobile development as identified in a recent report by Forrester Research.

"Modern applications are complex, multi-tiered and omnichannel," says "The Future of Mobile Experience Development, August 2016" report, authored by Jeffrey Hammond and Michael Facemire. "They arrive faster, scale up and down as necessary, and create value quicker than traditional applications. And developers often compose, rather than code, them. Development leaders must embrace modern application development techniques to achieve long-term success building mobile experiences."