Design And Implementation Of Visual Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development Environment

In recent years, with the rapid development of mobile Internet, the performance of mobile devices have been improved greatly. In this trend, the mobile devices will be the main tools to access the Internet. Mobile applications with different functions have found their ways into almost every aspect of human life. More and more developers will be devoted to the development of mobile applications. However, there are several kinds of mainstream mobile operating systems. Each system has its own architecture and application development platform. So it’s really a big challenge for developers to provide solutions for different platforms when developing applications. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a visual cross-platform mobile application development environment which is designed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications.This paper first introduces the research and comparison of mainstream cross-platform solutions, finds out the appropriate cross-platform approach with our subject and then studies the development process based on this approach.Then, this paper designs the system in general which consists application layer, development environment layer and service execution environment layer. The application layer focusses on the development of cross-platform middleware. The development environment layer takes responsible for generating the basic components of mobile application development. The service execution environment combines with the concept of flow based programming and event-driven mechanism of Node.js. The business process which provides backend services for mobile applications is created by combination of business or services.Next, this paper describes the implementation of the system. The framework of the application development environment is designed on the basis of the OSGi architecture. To make the system flexible and extensible, the function modules are encapsulated into OSGi components. The implementation of visual editor which provides visualization interface design tool is based on the framework and the way to binding events to interface elements using plugins is also proposed. After the design of the application, the compiling command of each platform will be called to generate cross-platform mobile application and return the installation package to the users. The service execution environment is designed on the basis of flow based programming and event-driven mechanism and it is used for providing services for the mobile application. The execution of a business process is separated into three part:the business definition, business loading and running in business execution engine.Finally, we conduct some experiments on the system with practical scenarios and analysis the results. Then we summary current work and prospect the next phase work.