Native Code Generation as a Service

Abstract

With the widespread use of mobile applications in daily life, it has become crucial for enterprise software companies to quickly develop these applications for multiple platforms. Cross-platform mobile application development is one of the most adopted solutions for rapid development. Since most of these solutions do not generate native code for the underlying platform, the artefacts generally do not satisfy the requirements defined at the beginning of the project. This study designed and implemented a native code generation framework called Nativator built as a cloud service. The framework, which is capable of producing native code for iOS and Android platforms using web-based user interfaces, was implemented based on an open source compiler platform called “Roslyn”. Four case studies were performed to analyze the execution performance of the applications built with the proposed framework. The experimental results demonstrated that the execution performance of the applications built with Nativator is comparable with the applications generated via the state-of-the-art mobile application development framework called Xamarin. Because this framework was implemented as a cloud service, it has several advantages over traditional approaches such as access from anywhere, no installation and flexible and more resources from cloud infrastructure.