Rapid application development for mobile terminals

Abstract

Mobile application development has become important because there are significantly more mobile phones in use today than computers in many emerging economies. With the advent of data services, mobile phones can be employed as capable computers. Many persons have ideas regarding how a phone could simplify transactions they engage in often, but may lack the time or skill to develop such applications. Currently, there are methods to develop such mobile applications but these methods are time consuming, tedious and repetitive. To tackle these challenges code generators can be used. Code generation is a mechanism to produce computer programs in some automatic manner. This technique can enhance software development in different ways by improving developer productivity, producing complete quality code and save time spent on application development. There are currently, no code generators to create complete, useful mobile applications to the best of the authors' knowledge. This paper illustrates how development can be improved by creating a code generator that builds standalone mobile applications, database applications with a mobile interface, and also creates PHP scripts that can be used to view the data on a desktop browser.