Enterprise applications – at least the ones I’ll be talking about in this article – are not very innovative. There are many different enterprise mobility solutions, you will not create a good product alone, most likely you will have to turn to a development company for help. So you can be sure to get a good result. Against the background of other developments, they stand out in a number of ways:
- More or less known requirements, entities, business processes and expected functionality. The functionality is quite wide, but similar in most applications.
- They have a long life: they are developed for a long time, and then they are used even longer, because they are difficult to replace. For a long time they are accompanied, added and developed.
- In general, the number of users varies. But here we will focus on large corporate applications – with hundreds and thousands of users. Dozens or hundreds of them work simultaneously.
- They have average requirements for hardware and code optimization. Applications are not cheap and it is not a problem for organizations to acquire enough powerful servers (for a known number of users).
- They make high demands on reliability, integrity and data protection, auditing, verification of access rights.
- Should integrate with existing (sometimes outdated) systems and be easy to expand.
Choosing The Right Technologies
In order to implement the planned wide functionality in a reasonable time, and generally meet the listed requirements, the development is carried out by a large team – a dozen or more specialists. Experience levels and performance can vary greatly, so it’s important to pick the right architecture early on. It is equally important to create a codebase with best practices in mind so that less experienced employees can focus on components that have already been written.
The listed features of projects determine the approach to choosing libraries, technologies, tools, and other artifacts. They can be divided into three categories: very small and lightweight (whether mature or immature), large and mature. For enterprise applications, you can choose either light or mature. Large, but not mature, it is risky to choose. The reason is simple – a small library is easier to patch on your own or even rewrite if something goes wrong. A mature product usually has satisfactory quality and a large community. For the problems you are facing, there is likely already a patch or a workaround.
But with a large but immature (or even insufficiently mature) product, there can be all sorts of surprises. A small community will not be able to help, there will be no workarounds, and it will be laborious or technically difficult to modify, rewrite or even replace the library on your own, even when a large team is working on the project. For an innovative product or startup, this might be the way to go. But for a corporate application, this is an unjustified risk.
Conclusion
The importance of enterprise application development for today’s business cannot be overemphasized. Creating a mobile project just for the sake of it or simply because it is a current trend is a waste of time, money and effort.
When you decide to start developing a mobile application for your business, be sure to consider how you can effectively use it and generate income, directly or indirectly improve some of the business processes.