This is part five in a seven part series from our ePaper - 6 Critical Steps to Adding Mobility to your Control System
Now that the relevant discussions have been had regarding data management and use cases, the project team can begin to determine the technologies, platforms, and implementation details which will provide a solution within the boundaries identified in the previous steps.
The architect plays a key role in this step because they factor in the requirements of the current project and also where the application is likely to expand post-project. Engineers have the role of writing code in ways that solve the problems defined by the use cases. They also must ensure that they code in a way that can benefit customers later by easily accommodating expansion to the application.
Platform choices are relevant here. For example, there is a platform called PhoneGap which provides a method for deploying to multiple mobile platforms. It allows creation of native applications based upon an HTML and JavaScript code base. This allows you to deploy your application across multiple devices and support new devices in the future with very little overhead.
On the surface, this provides a great opportunity for a unified experience across Android, iPhone, and other major platforms; but it also includes a bit of performance degradation since layers are added above the system level to support the additional common code bases. As you can see, there are often trade offs with decisions regarding application architecture and technologies utilized. It is important that the use cases, approach to data management, and overall problem statement are supported by the architecture decisions that are made.
