Internet technologies for the development of compatible applications on different computing platforms

Abstract

Nowadays more and more people are using their mobile phones much more than any other device. Thus, every software company invests in the development of mobile applications. Undoubtedly, some organizations can concentrate on only one mobile operating system and avoid all the others, yet it is important for many businesses to focus on a myriad of mobile devices with various operating systems. One of the most challenging situations for app developers is whether to develop a native or a cross-platform mobile app. Html, JavaScript, CSS are some of the languages, which are used to create applications on the Internet, through which the appropriate interfaces for the user's interaction with the services of a server are created. In the recent years, the number of software packages (frameworks) based on the above languages is constantly increasing and offer the possibility of developing compatible applications on many operating systems and mobile devices. The purpose of this thesis is the presentation of seven frameworks in order to describe the type of their availability and the services they offer, the advantages and disadvantages of their use and the environment setup on different operating systems. Particularly, an analysis will be made for the Xamarin, Apache Cordova (formerly Phonegap), Ionic, React Native, Flutter, Framework7 and NativeScript cross-platform frameworks. Ιn addition, an example code for each framework is presented and at the end a comparison is made as to which is the best framework according to two methods of multi-criteria decision analysis.