<a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/PiDAY.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-thumbnail wp-image-6247" src="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/PiDAY-150x150.gif" alt="" width="150" height="150" /></a>

Happy Pi Day readers!  It’s day 011 of FLISH MADNESS and we are continuing our conversation on End User Computing.

To review, we discussed yesterday that three things are needed for EUC to be successfully deployed in a corporate IT environment.

1.  Device agnosticism aka BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

2.  Application abstraction / Modern Application development (HTML 5)

3.  Secure MDM (Mobile Device Management)

We went in depth about topic number one <a href="http://egroup.jasonmangone.com/end-user-computing-part-1-of-3#more-6229">yesterday</a>.

Today we will discuss topic number 2:

Application abstraction / Modern Application development

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Just about everybody now has a tablet computing device, usually an iPad or Android device.  Those that don’t most likely have some type of smart phone.  The users of these devices are beginning to demand that their corporate legacy applications (most likely written for Microsoft Windows) work with their chosen device.  This can be done in two ways:

The first way is to sandbox and present the application to the device.  The “presentation” of the legacy applications really only has one player in the game right now and that is Citrix, though a few others are making strides, namely <a href="http://www.ericom.com/citrix_alternative.asp">Ericom</a>.  It makes sense that Citrix is the leader in this space with their <a href="http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=186">Xen App</a> product, they have been delivering data and applications from a distance for years.  What Citrix doesn’t do as well as others is abstract the application from the operating system and put it in a sandboxed environment.  VMware’s <a href="http://www.vmware.com/products/thinapp/overview.html">ThinApp</a> is the best tool in this space (at least in this blogger’s opinion).  What we at eGroup see as the “Best of Breed” design for delivering legacy applications to a mobile platform is first “Thinapping” the legacy app and then presenting the app to the device via Citrix Xen App and the Citrix receiver.  By doing this we are able to actually load more applications per Xen App server with less software conflicts.

The second way to get the corporate data and applications to the end point device is to rewrite there frontend interface with the native device programming language.  Though this is obviously more expensive we do have rumors that some of the big players out here are starting to go down this route.  For example, <a href="http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/21/022112-tech-apps-office/">Micrsoft Office for the iPad</a>.  There is an obvious advantage to this as the rewritten native applications are going to behave better  with a  “touch” interface then one that was written for a standard desktop OS with a mouse as navigational input device.

Beyond rewriting the applications with modern native device programming languages there is a large push to design the applications to run within the device’s browsers via HTML 5.  Really this is what JAVA has been trying (successfully in a lot of cases) to do for years.  The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_virtual_machine">JVM</a> loads an environment that is self-contained and unaware of the underlying operating system.

IMHO, in the long run I think we will see more and more application rewrites but there will likey always be use cases for packaging legacy applications and presenting them to modern devices.  Mainframes are still around aren’t they?  Though the numbers are dwindling.  Is this the path for x86 systems running Windows Apps?

Being the third day of FLISH MADNESS I am going to leave you readers with a little three point basketball factoid.

<a title="Chris Ford" href="http://hoopedia.nba.com/index.php?title=Chris_Ford">Chris Ford</a> of the Boston Celtics scored the first three-point field goal in NBA history with 3:48 left in the first quarter of the Celtics' 114-106 victory over Houston at Boston Garden (October 12, 1979).

The difference in the score between the Celtics and the Rockets for that game was 8.  8 multiplied by 3 (3<sup>rd</sup> day of FM) =24.  24 backwards = 42.  42 is Chris Ford’s Jersey number.  MADNESS I tell you.