Enabling Ordinary Users Mobile Development With Web Components

Abstract

The rapid progress of the mobile internet has been promoting the popularity of mobile devices, and mobile application development is getting more pervasive. However, the state of the art development environments has a high learning barrier for users' lack of programming experience. In this paper, instead of traditional programming environments, we take consideration of ordinary users' requirements and propose a WYSIWYG cross-platform web-component-based mobile application creation environment for ordinary users. This environment has a visual editor with a drag-and-drop web component. A web component library model is proposed to standardize customized libraries. A cross-platform application model based on web components is implemented to build applications rapidly. It helps ordinary users generate installing packages within simple operations for multiple platforms. A native plugin model is proposed to assist web components to invoke native functionalities. The experiment result shows that ordinary users could quickly start to create mobile applications in our environment.

Keywords

• Mobile service
• web components
• cross-platform
• ordinary users
• visual development