Enhanced Code Conversion Approach for the Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Development (ICPMD)

Mobile development companies aim to maximize the return on investments by making their mobile applications (Apps) available on different mobile platforms. Consequently, the same App is developed several times; each time the developer uses the programming languages and development tools of a specific platform. Therefore, there is a need to have cross-platform mobile applications development solutions that enable the developers to develop the App once and run it everywhere. The Integrated Cross-Platform Mobile Applications Development (ICPMD) solution is one of the attempts that enables the developers to use the most popular programming languages like Java for Android and C# for Windows Phone 8 (WP8). ICPMD is used to transform both the source code and user interface to another language to generate full Apps on the target platform. This paper extends ICPMD by proposing a new code conversion approach based on XSLT and Regular Expressions to ease the conversion process. In addition, it provides the assessment method to compare the ICPMD efficiency with competing approaches. Several Apps are converted from WP8 to Android and vice versa. The ICPMD evaluation results show reasonable improvement over commercial cross-platform mobile development tools (Titanium and Xamarin).

1 Introduction

The number of smartphone users is growing rapidly because of the availability of various mobile applications (Apps) that serve them in their daily life. Therefore, there is a demand to produce more Apps in different fields such as education [1], [2], [3], tourism [4], [5], environment [6], governmental services, and entertainment. There are several mobile platforms such as Android, Windows Phone (WP), iOS, and BlackBerry. Each platform vendor provides different programming languages, APIs, and development tools for the developers. Therefore, the developer has to develop the same App several times using different programming languages and libraries in order to produce one App that runs on different mobile platforms. This causes the waste of a lot of time and efforts. Consequently, mobile development companies start to use the cross-platform mobile applications development solutions. The main concept of the cross-platform solutions is to develop the App once and run it everywhere. There are many cross-platform mobile applications development solutions that are used commercially like: Titanium [7], Xamarin [8], and PhoneGap [9]. On the other hand, several tools are still under research and development like: XMLVM [10], J2ObjC [11] , MD2 [12], [13], and others.