Mobile Apps Mobility: An evaluation of HTML5 for cross-platform development

Abstract

In recent years, there hasbeen a growing interest in cross-platform development and HTML5 as adevelopment tool. The possibility for developers to code once and run onmultiple platforms could decrease development costs and make it easier totarget more platforms and reach more people. The popularity of HTML5 hasattracted developers to create tools that make the development process easier and faster.The goal of this thesis is to evaluate the use of HTML5 as development tool forcross-platform development, based on a case study where a prototype of acontext-aware application for news recommendation is built. This goal is reachedby studying current technologies, as well as the implemented solution of themobile news application. After the theoretical study and implementation of themobile news application is completed, an evaluation of the findings are carriedout to check if HTML5 is suitable for cross-platform mobile applicationdevelopment, based on the given use case. The evaluation results are then usedto give a conclusion about how well suited HTML5 is for this purpose.The mobile news application has been developed both as a pure webapplication and a hybrid application, where Apache Cordova is used as frameworkfor the hybrid approach. Evaluation of the two development approaches and thefindings in this thesis shows that the hybrid approach was slightly better thanthe pure web approach for the given case, especially when looking at the qualityof the application.