CARSB Portal: A Web-Based Software Tool to Composing Service Bricks and RESTful Services as Mobile Apps

The retrieval and the composition of information from multiple apps, services, or local resources can be time-consuming, costly, and inconvenient. To build an effective, efficient, and easy-to-use mobile service composition and delivery approach, in this research, we propose an approach called CARSB (Composite App with RESTful Services and Bricks). In CARSB, we introduce the concept of Service Brick, which is a rectangular UI component used for the display of specific information, devise a mobile service composition framework, which can integrate Service Bricks with backend RESTful services, and provide a web-based software tool, called CARSB Portal, to allow ordinary users to build their customized composite mobile applications according to their requirements. Notably, the CARSB Portal can facilitate the construction, discovery, composition, preview, and delivery of Service Bricks, i.e., CARSB Portal supports all activities for the lifecycle of Service Brick. Besides, in this research, quantitative experiments were conducted to verify the proposed CARSB approach, experiment results demonstrate that the proposed CARSB approach is able to achieve a considerable decrease in operation time and network transmission load.