A holistic approach for cross-platform software development

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive approach for cross-platform software development that leverages a general-purpose language and automatic code transformations to enable flexible, reusable, and cost-effective multi-platform applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel, extensible framework that integrates existing solutions and supports new platforms, improving cross-platform development beyond preconfigured solutions.

Findings

Successfully recreated an existing system using the approach

Developers found the approach practical and effective

Support for cross-platform testing was demonstrated

Abstract

Cross-platform development solutions can help to make software available on different devices and platforms. But these are normally restricted to preconfigured platforms and consider that each individual solution is equal or similar to each other. As a result, developers have to resort to native development and build individual solutions, one for each device/platform, that cooperate to deliver the desired global functionality. This article presents an approach that takes advantage of existing solutions and have support for extending and including new platforms, and distributing functionality across devices. The approach is based on a general-purpose language that raises the abstraction level in order to keep the software free from platform details. Automatic transformations produce executable code that can be properly divided and deployed separately into different platforms. The proposed approach was evaluated in four ways. In the first evaluation, an existing cross-platform system was recreated using the approach. The second and third evaluations was conducted with expert and novice developers, who tested the approach in practice. The fourth evaluation introduced support for cross-platform testing. Results have brought evidence supporting the following main contributions: use of a single environment, the ability to reuse similar concepts between platforms and the potential to reduce costs.