A Framework for Creating Applications for Different Mobile Operating Systems

• Autor(a) principal: Tavares, Pedro Jorge Madeira
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/6076
• topic: Aplicações Móveis; Aplicações Móveis Nativas e Não Nativas; Ferramentas Multi-Plataforma; Programação Móvel; Segurança Em Plataformas Baseadas Na Web; Sistemas Para Desenvolvimento de Aplicações Móveis Multi-Plataforma; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

The recent growth of the market share of smartphones has been bringing new companies into the mobile applications market. For these companies, these software pieces should typically have smaller life and development cycles in order to improve the productivity of the workers and react to market changes and to the clients expectations. To reduce the effort required for development and improve cost efficiency, it is thus important to develop mobile applications that are able to run on several platforms simultaneously with same code base, while assuring that the expectations of the final user are fulfilled. Because of this, many companies have been focusing some effort on searching or developing uncomplicated new means for rapidly conceiving and delivering mobile applications. This dissertation discusses a research work about systems for developing cross-platform web and mobile applications, which was the first main objective of this masters. Within this context, several existing tools were analysed, and their advantages, disadvantages and importance in the construction of mobile applications were described. These applications may be classified as native, non-native and hybrid. These classes were also subject to analysis. This initial study enabled understanding which was the most popular tool in the industry of software development for mobile devices. According to some reports on the area, PhoneGap is the one offering the most notorious panoply of functionalities and the Cross-Platform Tool (CPT) feeding most of the Cross- Platform to Mobile Development (CPMD) systems. CPMDs, which are web based platforms that elaborate on CPTs to provide communication between an application and the native Application Programming Interface (API) of a given mobile Operating System (OS), were then studied. In order to understand their way of functioning and benefits, an analysis to several similar systems was performed. The second main objective of this masters programme was to implement a CPMD. Starting from what was learned in the initial phase of the work, a requirement analysis for the conception of such systems was performed and, subsequently, the software engineering was elaborated. Some code optimizations of the code were produced during the development of the CPMD, in which several state-of-the-art security mechanisms were also implemented to assure availability, confidentiality and integrity. Since this system delivers native and non native mobile application, a comparative study between both types of applications was also performed, which enabled to better understand the trade-offs and differences in terms of performance, execution times and memory. This study embodies another contribution of this work. Apart from the dissertation, the completely functional prototype of a CPMD integrated with a CPT comprises the most visible outcome of this masters. Finally, concluding the work described herein, a survey was elaborated and delivered to a group of persons, who were asked to use the developed prototype. The idea was to assess if mobile applications and platforms like CPMDs were already seen as important business tools nowadays and also if the applications delivered by the prototype meet the respondents expectations. The improvement of some implementation, design and usability details was pointed out a possible future line of work.