Design And Implementation Of An Event Based Cross-platform Development Framework For Mobile Applications

With the rising of PDA, smart phone and other mobile computing devices, the operation system that embeds on the device grows rapidly as well. Also the growth of Mobile Applications is huge. At current stage, there are five main mobile operation systems on market, which is obviously an obstacle for the rapid development requirement of mobileapplication. That is why we'll need a solution to resolve this contradiction. This thesis will discuss the solution to the problem of developing a mobile application in a cross- platform way from the following respects:Firstly, this thesis analyzed a similar situation on non-mobile platforms, which has been a problem for long but resolved by years of practice. There are several methods to work out a ways of migrating an application among different platforms and systems. These practices that have already been proved to be applicable will be a good reference of finding out the solution for building a cross-platform mobile application. By studying on the PC based solution, we will be inspired.Secondly, this thesis also studied the design patterns and picked up some of those applicable ones. Adaptor Pattern works gives an adaptive way to let classes work together that could not otherwise because of incompatible interfaces by converting the interfaces of a class into another interface the clients expect. The Command Pattern encapsulates a request as an object, thereby letting you parameterize other objects with different requests, queue or log requests, and support undoable operations. The Observer Pattern defines a one-to-many dependency between objects so that when one object changes state, all of its dependents are notified and updated automatically. These methodologies made up the knowledge basis and key technologies for the cross-platform framework that is discussed in this thesis.Thirdly, this thesis presents a cross-platform mobile application development framework, which combines the web technologies and design patterns and bases on event handling. The framework abstracts and unifies the API to different mobile platform for the business logic layer to access. The framework uses an object-oriented JavaScript programming methodology, raises the adaptation layer to convert front-end APIs to SDK APIs, and lists several typical interfaces to conduct a feasibility analysis, demonstrates the feasibility of framework implementation.Fourthly, by using the cross-platform framework, this thesis discusses the implementation of a standalone application based on Android platform and a standalone application based on webOS platform and verifies its correctness. In addition, by the implementation and deployment of a cross-platform application for Android and webOS, we discussed and verified the ability of crossing among platforms.Through a series of analysis and practice, this thesis comes out the conclusion that this event-based cross-platform mobile application development framework is a feasible solution. The implementation process is simple, easy to do customization and optimization, easy to understand and master. It can help developers to improve development efficiency, and simplify code management and maintenance. The framework is scalable. It can access almost all of the mobile platforms. It is relatively simple, low in maintenance cost and almost free from the limitations of mobile device hardware. At this stage, it is an optimized choices of cross-platform mobile application development. With the development of mobile computing, mobile application development technologies continue to improve. We will see more and better cross-platform development strategy that can make the development of mobile applications easier.