Monthly Archives: July 2012

Architecture for Multi-device Applications: Part 2 – Implementation

Architecture for Multi-Device (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, Internet TV) Access

Part 1 of the series on “Architecture for Multi-Device Applications” focussed on the bare-bore design.

In Part 2, we look at high-level implementation structure – a slightly more detailed version of the design discussed in Part 1, before we start opening the individual boxes.

One of the key aspects that we discussed in Part 1 was the separation between the “Application Server” and “Web Server” layer and argued that most of the applications that we come across in real world, daily life, don’t really separate them… or rather we find them difficult to separate because of the choices that we have or we are “taught” in our life.

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Architecture for Multi-device Applications: Part 1 – Definition

One of the questions that keeps coming to me over and over again is – what is an ideal architecture for multi-device applications or rather applications that cater to multiple devices like desktop, mobiles, tablets, internet-TVs and what not?

This is quite interesting and exciting as more and more frameworks get developed. We started the multi-device world with native apps and soon realized that the model doesn’t scale. There came HTML apps (or what people naively refer to as HTML5). I won’t call them as really HTML5 (HTML5 only) apps… since you can live with HTML4 and CSS2 for most of the purposes unless you want features specific to HTML5 – most common being using audio/video since Flash is unavailable on iOS (iPhone, iPad etc).

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