Cross-platform development techniques for mobile devices

Abstract

Business and the military have become increasingly dependent on mobile technology in the last decade. The proliferation of mobile devices provides application developers a new and growing market for providing solutions. Mobile devices run on diverse platforms requiring differing constraints that the developer must adhere to. Thus, extra time and resources must be expended to develop multiple versions of a single application for the different platforms. There have been attempts to minimize the need for these extra costs with mobile cross-platform development environments such as Titanium, PhoneGap, and Corona. They are relatively new to the mobile application building world, and though they have the same goal, their approaches are quite different. In this thesis, we will provide a detailed analysis of these three cross-platform development tools by using each to develop applications, and then compare each by describing relative strengths and weaknesses.