Mobile Applications Get Real

First off, full disclosure: I don’t own a PDA. I’ve long dismissed them as expensive gadgets whose main function is to distract people from the boredom of commuting. But one need not look far to see the error in my observation. How shocked I was to discover that some of my fellow commuters are doing actual work on their PDAs! And I don’t mean just e-mail. A growing number of workers employ these devices to access company data using custom applications developed in-house and then deployed to the field. That’s part of what prompted this month’s special report on “going mobile.” Specifically, we wanted to explore with you the issues that developers and architects face when they set out to build these applications.