When developing applications for mobile devices you often find the need to use a rapid application development (RAD) platform to achieve your goals and meet the time to market requirements for mobility projects. I have been developing mobile applications for several years now and I have seen many development platforms/frameworks. There are many reasons why you often need to take use of a platform/framework; wide device support, rich and flexible UI, secure and reliable communication, back-end integration and so on. If you were to take care of all these challenges by your selves the application development project would be expensive and time consuming. This post is written with large commercial enterprise applications in mind.
You should be very careful when selecting a platform for your project, by selecting the wrong platform your in for failure. The most important you need to do is to define your needs and make sure that the platform your are choosing fulfills those (or at least the most of them). Many companies/developers have different views on how to develop mobile applications, make sure that your chose a platform developed by a company that shares your view on this.
