Salesforce.com is refreshing its take on mobile application development. The company today released a trio of Developer Mobile Packs aimed at allowing JavaScript developers to quickly construct applications built on top of API-accessed Salesforce.com-based data. The company also announced that it will update its Mobile SDK to version 2.0 at the end of April.
Adam Seligman, vice president of Salesforce.com platform developer relations, said that the current state of mobile development can be daunting for enterprises, which likely already have a competency in Web technologies. Mobile development skills, however, are harder to come by, he said. As such, developers are in high demand.
“It’s all about developer experience,” said Seligman. “If these companies have an entire Web development team internally, they should be able to make them mobile developers.”
Thus, Salesforce.com decided that its Mobile SDK should make it easy for Web developers to build mobile applications in Web languages like HTML5 and JavaScript. And rather than building some multi-platform development framework from scratch, Seligman said the new Salesforce.com Mobile SDK is based on PhoneGap, now known as the Apache Cordova project. (The Cordova Project allows HTML5 applications to be deployed as Android or iPhone native applications, ready for distribution into their respective app stores.)
Another way Seligman said Salesforce.com was addressing mobile development woes is through its new Developer Mobile Packs, each of which bridges the gap between Salesforce.com-hosted data and JavaScript-based front ends.
In the past, Salesforce.com has pushed its Force.com platform as the way to build applications that utilize the abundance of customer information enterprises have stored within Salesforce.com. Seligman said that a few months ago, Salesforce.com crossed the billion-transactions-per-day mark, and of those transactions, half used the Salesforce.com REST and SOAP APIs. That means developers are building applications outside of the Salesforce.com platform, yet are using the data stored there.
“When I talk to customers, it’s about their business data,” said Seligman. “It’s about their data around partners. It’s not the ‘where,’ it’s the ‘what.’ Data is the key. [Data] makes all these customer engagements more valuable.”
Seligman said the Developer Mobile Packs are built to support AngularJS, Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile. He said these packs are available on GitHub today, and are open source under the BSD 3-clause license.
The Salesforce.com Mobile SDK 2.0 will be available in its final form at the end of April, but is available today on GitHub as a beta.
