A friend was giving me grief about my HTML5 prejudice. His perspective is that Apple (News – Alert) rules and if you are using anything else you are wasting time… Well, maybe not that dramatic. If you write for Apple first your code can be ported elsewhere. In some ways, he makes a lot of sense since objective C, is a portable.

For some companies, I am sure his logic is correct, but for many companies the legacy migration goes beyond Apple.

For example, over 900 companies use Synactive’s guixt server to manage the user interface to their SAP (News – Alert) systems. Synactive delivers the Liquid UI interface to both Android, iOS and HTML5 as separate modules.

Today Synactive Inc. announced a new “touch-friendly, Web-based interface for SAP ERP to allow users to experience a visually appealing user interface to increase the user’s perception of SAP ERP’s usefulness, ease of use and efficiency. This interface will make SAP ERP no longer look like SAP ERP, which when combined with Synactive’s other tools, can streamline the business process by reducing errors, reducing training, improving master data quality and improving business efficiencies.”

Synactive’s interfaces take away a lot of the issues that come with using a heavy client and reduces requirements, such as:

• No SAP or Kernel Upgrade required
• No SAP Gateway (News – Alert), ITS, or SAP Mobile Platform required
• Unified solution and reusable code for any touchpoint

This is important particularly when you consider that SAP’s earnings were off as a result of the customer’s migration to the cloud. It maybe that SAP will acquire Synactive to embed the offering and make their interfaces more like Salesforce.com (News – Alert).

Salesforce.com of course has its own development community that uses their REST APIs https://developer.salesforce.com/en/mobile/getting-started/android and PhoneGap.

In these cases, HTML5 is treated like an equal to iOS and Android (News – Alert). It maybe that I will the argument one day, but for today, I think it’s a draw.