Mobile devices create new opportunities for companies. However, innovative applications can cause challenges for software and system architecture. In this chapter, the authors describe a trap to fall into when starting a promising mobile application in a shortsighted way. When the application gets popular and successful, diversity of mobile platforms increases. Many users have an almost emotional relationship to their own smartphone or platform and may not be willing to change it. In order to make the mobile application available to more users, a company may be tempted to add a “simple” extension to accommodate other platforms. Thus, the diversity in devices leads to diversity in distributed object technologies and with it to problems in complexity and compatibility. The authors describe an approach that counters this problem with RESTful services. They use the ConTexter system for illustrating experiences with the problem and for evaluating a proposed solution. The chapter shows the key issues the authors had to solve while migrating ConTexter to a RESTful platform.
