Web and Mobile: Cross-Platform Development with JavaScript Technologies

Nowadays, mobile devices are getting increasingly important. Especially after the expansion of mobile networks and the support of LTE standards, mobile devices are a very important tool in everyday business. Therefore, there is a growing demand for mobile applications. In the area of mobile devices, there are different operating systems. Currently the market is dominated by Android and iOS, which will therefore be in the main focus of this thesis. When developing an application, the developer has to use a Software Development Kit, which is provided for each specific operating system. This means that the application has to be implemented multiple times, once for every operating system it shall run on. In addition, it may be required to implement a desktop version of the application as well. To deal with this developing effort, a cross-platform application can be the solution. In cross-platform development, code reusability is improved in contrast to the native solutions. In the best case it has to be written only once and can then be translated to platform-specific code. Thereby the effort and cost of the implementation is drastically reduced. There are several frameworks which take care of the translation task. This thesis deals with investigating and analysing different types of cross-platform frameworks used for developing mobile applications. The selected frameworks transcompile existing JavaScript code into native code. In this thesis, the focus will be on NativeScript and React Native, because these two frameworks build native applications for the target platforms. In combination with a prototype based on the KISTERS ESSCockpit application, these frameworks will be evaluated with respect to their usability for the KISTERS AG. This application monitors the schedules that are used on the international energy market. Finally, this thesis proposes a concept for developing cross-platform applications to meet KISTERS’ quality standards.

Project information

Status:

Finished

Thesis for degree:

Master

Student:

Leonidas Lazos

Supervisor:
Id:

2017-003