Overview
Nowadays, application development for smart devices is an evolving field with great economic and scientific interest. According to Gartner [9] the total number of mobile app store downloads worldwide will increase to 81 billion in 2013, paid downloads will surpass 8 billion and free downloads 73 billion. With the currently increasing number of mobile platforms, developing mobile applications became very difficult for companies as they need to develop the same applications for each target platform.
The typical process of developing native applications is the appropriate way of deploying mobile apps but has one major disadvantage: it is not possible to reuse the source code for another platform; the very same app must be redeveloped from scratch..
Native apps are developed using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides the necessary development tools for building and debugging the applications. Native apps are more difficult to develop and require a high level of experience and technological know-how than other types of applications.
The Comparative Review
The unexpected growth in the mobile market motivated the implementation of cross-platform software development environments that could make the development easier and more efficient. The main categories of applications produced by these software environments are web, hybrid, interpreted and generated apps.
None of the approaches is neither prevalent nor the best solution to the problem of developing cross-platform mobile applications. There are many other development environments which can be classified into intermediate categories. For example, the commercial software IBM Worklight subdivides the category of hybrid apps into two subcategories: the hybrid web applications and mixed hybrid applications [20].
According to IBM, the source code of hybrid web applications consists exclusively of HTML5, and is executed through a web browser, while the mixed hybrid applications can execute native code calls through a native API.
Comparative Analysis of the Software
In this section a comparative analysis of the aforementioned cross-platform mobile app development approaches is presented based on a set of characteristics converging with the set of criteria proposed in [16]. In this paper the authors proposed the specific set of criteria for assessing cross-platform development approaches and utilized them for comparing frameworks that bridge the gap between web and mobile systems, like PhoneGap and Titanium Mobile.
The criteria we use for the comparative analysis of cross-platform development approaches are the following:
- Market place deployment (distribution). Evaluates whether and how easy it is to deploy apps to the app stores of mobile platforms, like Google Play or Apple’s iTunes.
- Widespread technologies: Evaluates whether apps can be created using widespread technologies, such as JavaScript.
- Hardware and data access: Evaluates whether apps have no access, limited or full access to the underlying device hardware and data.
- User interface and look and feel: Evaluates whether apps inherently support native user interface components or native user interface and look and feel is simulated through libraries, such as JQuery Mobile.
Conclusion
Technology has come a long way since then, and the variety of the information objects we’re managing has changed a lot, but one tenet has remained constant we’ve always focused on the intersection of people, processes, and information. As the Association for Intelligent Information Management, we help organizations put their information to work.
No comment yet, add your voice below!