From native to cross-platform hybrid development : CodeGT, design and development of a mobile app for ERP

The current trend towards mobility of individuals, together with the exponential growth of the number of mobile devices led the market to a boom in the demand for the development of mobile applications. Moreover, with the expansion and heterogeneity of the mobile devices and platforms, software companies need to search for faster and cheaper ways to develop applications that can span as many devices as possible to capture the market. Currently, the Android and iOS Operating Systems roughly share and dominate the mobile market, with timid expressions of other competitors. Each of these mobile operating systems were developed using their own languages, strategy and SDKs for development of applications using their libraries – known as Native apps. On the other hand, the evolution of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript created generic alternatives to create mobile apps that run on devices on all operating systems, although lacking the capability to access the device’s full potential. Alongside came the new Hybrid cross-platform development frameworks, which try to take the best of both worlds. This dissertation describes the evolution of the different mobile app development approaches and the state-of-the-art in their development techniques, and compares them with the Hybrid app approach, then highlighting the trends in mobile app development using Hybrid platforms and their advantages. This research includes the development of a mobile Hybrid application, CodeGT, which interacts with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to access the Transport Documents registered in this ERP and access to the code transmitted by the Portuguese Tax Authority (AT), therefore not requiring the printing of documents and meeting a need of the business market. This application does already have customer industry companies interested in it.As tendências atuais em direção à grande mobilidade dos indivíduos, juntamente com o crescimento exponencial do número de dispositivos móveis, levaram ao enorme crescimento na procura do desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis. Além disso, com a expansão e heterogeneidade dos dispositivos e das plataformas móveis, as empresas de desenvolvimento de software necessitam de encontrar formas mais rápidas e baratas de desenvolver aplicações capazes de abranger o maior número de dispositivos para ir ao encontro da elevada procura do mercado. Atualmente, os sistemas operativos Android e iOS dividem e dominam o mercado de dispositivos móveis com expressões tímidas de outros concorrentes. Cada um desses sistemas operativos móveis foi desenvolvido especificamente para linguagens de programação e estratégias próprias e oferecem um conjunto de ferramentas de desenvolvimento com as suas bibliotecas, para a criação de aplicações nativas. Por outro lado, a evolução do HTML5, CSS e do JavaScript criaram oportunidades para o surgimento de alternativas genéricas para criação de aplicações multiplataforma que correm em todos os dispositivos e em todos os sistemas operativos, mas sem a capacidade de aceder todo o potencial nativo do dispositivo. Paralelamente surgiram as novas plataformas de desenvolvimento híbridas, que tentam tirar o melhor partido dos dois mundos. Esta dissertação descreve a evolução das diferentes abordagens no desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis mais concretamente na utilização de ferramentas multiplataformas para a criação de aplicações móveis híbridas e as suas vantagens. A pesquisa incluiu ainda o desenvolvimento de uma aplicação móvel, CodeGT, desenvolvido numa plataforma híbrida para interagir com um software ERP, acedendo aos Documentos de Transporte registados nesse ERP, assim como ao código transmitido pela Autoridade Tributária (AT), que assim dispensa a impressão de documentos e indo ao encontro de uma necessidade do mercado. Esta aplicação já tem empresas clientes interessadas nela

The Challenges of Designing Digital Services for Multiple Mobile Platforms

The value of digital services is increasingly recognized by owners of digital platforms. These services have central role in building and sustaining the business of the digital platform. In order to sustain the design of digital services, owners of digital platforms encourage third-party developers to tap into and join the digital ecosystem. However, while there is an emerging literature on designing digital services, little empirical evidence exists about challenges faced by third-party developers while designing digital services, and in particular for multiple mobile platforms. Drawing on a multiple case study of three mobile application development firms from Sweden, Denmark and Norway, we synthesize the digital service design taxonomy to understand the challenges faced by third-party developers. Our study identifies a set of challenges in four different levels: user level, platform level, distribution level and ecosystem level. The identified challenges are then illustrated by different design dimensions. For each challenge, we identified set of factors and classified them under three objectives: business, interaction and technology. In doing this, our research extends and complements existing digital service literature and contributes new knowledge about the design of digital services

How To Create An App

Mobile Computing is booming and everyone has ideas how to profit from it. But only few people know how to build an app that will make those ideas a reality. Businesses are looking for innovative ways to generate revenue from this rapidly growing technology while taking the advantage of the immediacy and convenience that mobile technology has to offer. Mobile apps play a vital role, and have changed the focus from what's on the Web, to the apps on mobile devices, and it is no longer an option but an imperative. The purpose of this article is to provide information on how to create an app and to explore the commonly used tools and technologies to create an app

Augmenting Space Technology Program Management with Secure Cloud & Mobile Services

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Game Changing Development (GCD) program manages technology projects across all NASA centers and reports to NASA headquarters regularly on progress. Program stakeholders expect an up-to-date, accurate status and often have questions about the program's portfolio that requires a timely response. Historically, reporting, data collection, and analysis were done with manual processes that were inefficient and prone to error. To address these issues, GCD set out to develop a new business automation solution. In doing this, the program wanted to leverage the latest information technology platforms and decided to utilize traditional systems along with new cloud-based web services and gaming technology for a novel and interactive user environment. The team also set out to develop a mobile solution for anytime information access. This paper discusses a solution to these challenging goals and how the GCD team succeeded in developing and deploying such a system. The architecture and approach taken has proven to be effective and robust and can serve as a model for others looking to develop secure interactive mobile business solutions for government or enterprise business automation

Smart cities: event everywhere

The research attempts to provide a big picture from the literature through a Systematic Literature Review about the smart city and the existing standards topics for interchanging data through Smart City Apps. Additionally a prototype was created to analyze one of the standards found in the SL

Usability and Security in Medication. Administration Applications

The traditional process of filling the medicine trays and dispensing the medicines to the patients in the hospitals is manually done by reading the printed paper medicinechart. This process can be very strenuous and error-prone, given the number of sub-tasksinvolved in the entire workflow and the dynamic nature of the work environment.Therefore, efforts are being made to digitalise the medication dispensation process byintroducing a mobile application called Smart Dosing application. The introduction ofthe Smart Dosing application into hospital workflow raises security concerns and callsfor security requirement analysis. This thesis is written as a part of the smart medication management project at EmbeddedSystems Laboratory, A˚bo Akademi University. The project aims at digitising the medicine dispensation process by integrating information from various health systems, and making them available through the Smart Dosing application. This application is intended to be used on a tablet computer which will be incorporated on the medicine tray. The smart medication management system include the medicine tray, the tablet device, and the medicine cups with the cup holders. Introducing the Smart Dosing application should not interfere with the existing process carried out by the nurses, and it should result in minimum modifications to the tray design and the workflow. The re-designing of the tray would include integrating the device running the application into the tray in a manner that the users find it convenient and make less errors while using it. The main objective of this thesis is to enhance the security of the hospital medicine dispensation process by ensuring the security of the Smart Dosing application at various levels. The methods used for writing this thesis was to analyse how the tray design, and the application user interface design can help prevent errors and what secure technology choices have to be made before starting the development of the next prototype of the Smart Dosing application. The thesis first understands the context of the use of the application, the end-users and their needs, and the errors made in everyday medication dispensation workflow by continuous discussions with the nursing researchers. The thesis then gains insight to the vulnerabilities, threats and risks of using mobile application in hospital medication dispensation process. The resulting list of security requirements was made by analysing the previously built prototype of the Smart Dosing application, continuous interactive discussions with the nursing researchers, and an exhaustive state-of-the-art study on security risks of using mobile applications in hospital context. The thesis also uses Octave Allegro method to make the readers understand the likelihood and impact of threats, and what steps should be taken to prevent or fix them. The security requirements obtained, as a result, are a starting point for the developers of the next iteration of the prototype for the Smart Dosing application.Siirretty Doriast

Study and Development of Cross-Platform Cloogy Mobile Application for VPS – Virtual Power Solutions.

A energia renovável e a conservação de energia tornaram-se tópicos importantes nos últimos anos. As empresas têm realizado esforços para reduzir o consumo de energia através da otimização de dispositivos e da conscientização dos consumidores sobre o seu uso. Para contribuir com este esforço, a Virtual Power Solutions (VPS) fornece uma solução onde os proprietários / utilizadores de edifícios obtêm visibilidade e controle em tempo real dos seus aparelhos elétricos instalados na sua residência. A VPS alcançou com sucesso a gestão de procura, e a tecnologia de automação de edifícios numa única aplicação móvel designada por Cloogy. Esta aplicação fornece aos consumidores de energia e aos seus parceiros a capacidade de verificar e controlar o consumo de energia em tempo real, permitindo reduzir o nível de consumo ao mínimo sem comprometer as operações do dia a dia. Atualmente, a Cloogy tem suas aplicações móveis disponíveis para Android, iOS e Windows Phone com funcionalidades semelhantes. Deste modo, porem cada aplicação requer diferentes linguagens de programação para cada plataforma, o que envolve um custo para manter essas diferentes plataformas. Por esta razão, para a presente tese, a VPS appresentou o objetivo de desenvolver uma aplicação móvel híbrida, que se baseará numa base de código único e terá acesso a todas as APIs da plataforma. Diferentes tipos de ferramentas de desenvolvimento estão disponíveis para construir uma aplicação híbrida. Depois de definir os requisitos funcionais e não-funcionais, um protótipo de aplicação híbrida foi construído usando o Ionic Framework, que consiste numa das Frameworks de código aberto os disponíveis para construir aplicações móveis híbridas. Com a ajuda desta framework, uma aplicação móvel pode ser criada usando um conjunto de tecnologias da web, como JavaScript, HTML e CSS, e implementada o aplicativo em todas as principais plataformas, como Android e iOS. O protótipo construído nos permite-nos aceder a dados de consumo através do nosso smartphone ou tablet a partir de uma localização remota com a ajuda da iEnergy3 API da VPS. As principais características oferecidas pelo protótipo são a monitorização do consumo de energia através de registros e dados em tempo real, e a verificação dos indicadores de consumo como desempenho, média diária, previsões, etc. O protótipo também fornece pegadas ecológicas, conjuntamente com indicadores de consumo, e é capaz de controlar e agendar períodos de consumo de electricidade a partir de um local remoto.N/

ENABLING MOBILE DEVICES TO HOST CONSUMERS AND PROVIDERS OF RESTFUL WEB SERVICES

The strong growth in the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in Enterprise Information Systems has led to growing research in the area of mobile Web services. Web services are applications that are developed based on network standards such as Services Oriented Architecture and Representational State Transfer (REST). The mobile research community mostly focused on facilitating the mobile devices as client consumers especially in heterogeneous Web services. However, with the advancement in mobile device capabilities in terms of processing power and storage, this thesis seeks to utilize these devices as hosts of REST Web services. In order to host services on mobile devices, some key challenges have to be addressed. Since data and services accessibility is facilitated by the mobile devices which communicate via unstable wireless networks, the challenges of network latency and synchronization of data (i.e. the Web resources) among the mobile participants must be addressed. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a cloud-based middleware that enables reliable communication between the mobile hosts in unreliable Wi-Fi networks. The middleware employs techniques such as message routing and Web resources state changes detection in order to push data to the mobile participants in real time. Additionally, to ensure high availability of data, the proposed middleware has a cache component which stores the replicas of the mobile hosts’ Web resources. As a result, in case a mobile host is disconnected, the Web resources of the host can be accessed on the middleware. The key contributions of this thesis are the identification of mobile devices as hosts of RESTful Web services and the implementation of middleware frameworks that support mobile communication in unreliable networks