Recently I met a lot of startup founders and directors through Singapore Entrepreneur & Developer
community. While many of them are interested to provide both web and mobile solution for their
application, some of them are thinking to get the web version out first and think about mobile
applications later.
In either case, they need to think of an approach that’s more agile and easily extensible. Many
developers would follow the conventional way of building an application and adding components for
more platforms they would support. That not only makes them write the same functional features
multiple times but also make it less scalable as and when more users will start using the
application.
I have jotted down an easier and more scalable approach which encourages in creation and adaptation
of an API based route. While in the first approach the number of controllers or methods are directly
proportional to the number of supported platforms, in the second approach they can leverage on the
single set of APIs. As and when they will support more platforms they can parse the API response
and display it as per the device form factor and designs. As most of the modern platforms like
mobile os, web technologies, internet TV, think-clients support XML or JSON parsing it will be
easier to re-use the same code or set of APIs to enable the solution for a new platform.
