Many organizations that have not previously deployed mobile applications are now rushing to catch up.

In a previous post, we identified the main mobile platforms. If is desirable to deploy to the 3 main platforms, but each platform has a different development tool-set and capabilities.Developing a separate application for each platform will consume considerable time and expense. Also, its very difficult to ensure consistent functionality and behavior across all the apps.

This is a situation where we can apply the architectural principle of reuse. By keeping as much of the functionality on the server, we can reduce the footprint of the apps. An easy way to do this is to create a mobile version of your web site (e.g m.yoursite.com). Each app can merely be a shell that invokes the mobile web site.

There are other considerations when making your mobile architecture decisions (e.g. bandwidth, network availability, security), but this gives an idea of one of the more critical criteria that is considered.