Cross-Platform Mobile Development

Abstract

Smartphones become much more used these days than feature phones and personal computers because of the variety of mobile applications that are available to be downloaded from the application stores. There are many smartphones‟ vendors in the market and each vendor uses a different mobile platform. Each platform vendor provides different development tools and programming languages for the developers. Therefore, the development of the same application for different platforms means repeating the same work several times; each time using the programming language and development tools of a specific mobile platform. Cross-platform mobile development solutions solve this problem by having a main concept. This concept is enabling the developer to develop the application once and run it anywhere. The cross-platform solutions use different approaches for native development such as: Cross-Compilation, Interpretation, Model-Driven Development, Component-Based …etc. This thesis surveys the existing cross-platform mobile development approaches, attempts to propose a comprehensive categorization for them, defines the pros and cons of each approach, and explains sample solutions per approach. The survey defines the limitations of the existing cross-platform solutions and the open research areas. This thesis introduces an Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Applications Development (ICPMD) solution which attempts to enhance the limitations of the existing solutions by: (1) helping the developer to develop with the most popular programming languages like Java for Android and C# for Windows Phone, (2) focusing on both the source code and user interface transformations to generate full applications, and (3) supporting code reuse. The ICPMD supports two platforms: Windows Phone 8 and Android. This thesis proposes and implements a new code conversion approach by using the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) and Regular Expressions. The implemented approach is used to convert several mobile applications from the Windows Phone 8 platform to the VI Android platform and vice versa. The thesis compares the generated application from the proposed ICPMD approach to its native counterpart and to generated applications from two commercial tools (Titanium, and Xamarin). The evaluation of the ICPMD generated applications shows substantial improvement over the existing crossplatform mobile development solutions.