OStatic

Funambol Acquires Zapatec, Aims to Simplify Mobile Web App Development

Open source mobile push email and sync provider, Funambol announced today it has acquired AJAX Web 2.0 framework provider Zapatec. Currently, mobile Web app developers are forced to build native apps for several different platforms, a process that's time-consuming and costly. Funambol's acquisition of Zapatec addresses the issue by offering a way for developers to build open mobile browser apps that take advantage of a phone's native capabilities, yet supports multiple devices.

Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco tells OStatic he sees good things ahead as a result of this new partnership. "Developers today need to build separate native apps for too many mobile platforms, including the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BREW, mobile Linux, Java ME and other proprietary mobile OSs and environments. It is too much work to support all of these platforms, which forces developers to make difficult choices about which phones to support."

"The integration of Funambol and Zapatec will make it easier to build one version of an app that supports a wide variety of phones. The key difference is that developers will be able to create rich mobile browser native apps, with mobile sync and push capabilities, so that they get the best of both worlds -- broad device coverage and rich native apps."

Capobianco says the acquisition came about after the two companies worked together and he saw the potential to help developers solve the persistent device fragmentation problem. "Zapatec is a leading provider of AJAX web 2.0 technology. We collaborated with them to build our new AJAX web portal which was launched in September, and in the process, we found their software was of the highest caliber. We knew that other people would benefit by having access to this quality code. We see the future of mobile being rich mobile browser native apps with sync and push capabilities, which will resolve the widespread problem of device fragmentation that plagues the industry. By acquiring Zapatec, Funambol now has the technology and expertise to create next-generation rich mobile browser native apps."

Although some of Zapatec's code is currently closed, Capobianco says that could change in the future. "Like Funambol, some of Zapatec's code is open source and some is not. The acquisition will not change this situation in the short term. Longer term, we may decide to open source additional Zapatec code, to provide our community with more resources and technology to create rich mobile browser apps."

• Funambol
• zapatec
• mobile web apps

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