Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development for Smart Services

Abstract

Current technological advances and the growth of smart applications and services require the development of multi-platform mobile applications. Writing software to run on multiple computing platforms can involve a large amount of duplicate effort. This duplicate effort can take the form of re-implementing the business logic in a different language, re-implementing the user interface or, in many cases, re-implementing both for each platform. There are many cross-platform frameworks to help reduce or eliminate this effort, but they make compromises on performance or user experience. Hence, this paper presents a cross-platform framework whose goal is to reduce this compromise by aiming to minimise platform-specific code, but not eliminate it. Using this method will allow all platforms to have a featurerich, native interface, with most of the code, including user interface code, contained in a cross-platform library used by all platforms. Hence, this work establishes a framework for developing cross-platform GUI applications, involving the design and development of a common library as well as translation libraries for iOS, Android, and Windows. This developed framework has been successfully applied to the implementation of a real-world application for smart lift services.