Cross-platform Mobile Applications with Web Technologies

Abstract

The extended use of smart mobile devices has become an integral part of daily life leading to the expansion of mobile application development. Currently, the majority of mobile applications are native applications that need an initial installation prior to being utilized. In addition, for a given application, a separate software development process could be required for each mobile platform, which subsequently increases dramatically the corresponding effort and cost. With the emergence of HTML5 these issues can be addressed efficiently, since web technologies allow the application development in a cross-platform manner. An important benefit is that users can have easy and immediate access the application without any need for downloading and installation. In this manuscript, we investigate the potentials of mobile application development with web technologies and we present a development framework that we have designed and implemented. This framework utilizes the most important state-of-art web technologies for the support of mobile devices. It can be used for the implementation of mobile web applications and also for the investigation and experimentation on the main features that HTML5 offers for this specific type of devices.