Android in Enterprise

After asserting its dominance in the consumer mobile device arena, Android seems to be set for giving Apple a run for its money in the enterprise market. A report by Good Technology, a leader in multiplatform enterprise mobility, reveals that Android is the second most used OS in the enterprise sector. Android is a serious contender because of its portability and the low cost of development due to a global community of open source developers.

The following are some of the main advantages offered by Android:

• One of the biggest advantages is that it is built on an open-source framework so development is robust and cost effective;
• It challenges the monopoly of Apple because it is a part of the Open Handset Alliance, therefore most of the leading handset manufacturers offer Android phones;
• Unlike Apple apps, most of the apps in Android store are free;
• It allows you to multitask by simultaneously running many applications such as Facebook, audio files, etc;
• It has an excellent notification system so you don’t miss any sms, email, or other important communique. The indicator on the home screen doesn’t let you forget about it;

Some Issues and Concerns Related to Android

The two biggest concerns about Android are corporate data security and user management, especially in view of the popularity of corporate BYOD (bring your own device) programs.

The variety of Android devices, variations of the operating system and additional software makes the job of CIO’s quite difficult. A primary issue in this case is user management because Android does not have a built-in capability for tracking usage or catching policy violations by device users. Perhaps the biggest issue is data encryption; almost 80% of the devices being used don’t support encryption.

Data manipulation and usage is also one of the major concerns for enterprise CIO’s. Since newer versions of Android support 4G, the consumption of data is quite significant and so is its cost impact on the organization. Users often don’t realize how much data they are consuming, which significantly increases the coverage charges that have to be paid by the organization.

Despite these issues, Android is definitely here to stay and its market will continuously grow. If you are a business owner, getting your own Android app is certainly a good idea for reaching out to your target market.

Google Dart ! Yet another programming language in horizon

Google announced a structured programming language which could run on top of vm or js run-time compiled. Any modern browser like Chrome, Safari 5+, Firefox 4+ will support as dart code can be translated to JavaScript. It supports classes, interface, optional types. The specs are still very early stage. The language will support both running in server side and client side. Google is also developing a cloud based IDE called Brightly. Google’s goal is to ultimately replace JavaScript. (^). The language originally was called Dash. The information initially leaked from internal Google email ^.

To find out more about Dart head over to Dart website. A sample code block looks like the following:

Sample code to calculate Fibonacci:

int fib(int n) {
if (n <= 1) return n;
return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2);
}

main() {
print('fib(20) = ${fib(20)}');
}

Now Google to put SQL to Cloud

When Google first beta released to public back in April 2008, Google App Engine came with GQL instead of SQL database support. Although GQL was highly scalable, it had lot of limitations compare to traditional relational databases. Since then it was a requested feature from the users of App Engine. Google finally listened to them and announced the Google SQL Database. It has put MySQL like similar database infrastructure for App Engine users. The service also includes existing database import facility and export facility for easier migration to cloud. According to Google AppEngine Blog some of the benefits includes:

• No maintenance or administration – we manage the database for you.
• High reliability and availability – your data is replicated synchronously to multiple data centers. Machine, rack and data center failures are handled automatically to minimize end-user impact.
• Familiar MySQL database environment with JDBC support (for Java-based App Engine applications) and DB-API support (for Python-based App Engine applications).
• Comprehensive user interface for administering databases.
• Simple and powerful integration with Google App Engine.

Google Cloud SQL is currently available for Google App Engine applications that are written in Java or Python. Check out the details in http://code.google.com/apis/sql/docs/introduction.html.