Date of Award
Summer 2012
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Computing
First Advisor
Ahamed, Sheikh I.
Second Advisor
Kaczmarek, Thomas
Third Advisor
Ge, Rong
Abstract
As technology advances in the field of mobile computing with smartphones and tablet computers becoming less expensive, people are adopting these devices into their daily lives. Due to this adoption, many developers are finding opportunities to develop apps that target this growing form factor. One of the issues that developers come across when developing for these multiple platforms is that there is a need to redesign common elements of their applications for each of their platforms. They are also challenged with the decision of breaking the prescribed design guidelines for each of the platforms they are developing for so that they are able to provide support for these applications in the future. In this thesis, we propose a solution to this problem by generalizing common user interface elements and configure them outside of the application. Our solution, called ClayUI, uses a client server model to house and publish user interface elements to a mobile application using an API that is written in the target platform’s native programming language. Our solution allows a developer to create a mobile application that adheres to the platform’s design guidelines with the flexibility of being able to port it to other platforms without having to do a full redesign of the application. Our solution also introduces features that assist the developer with the process of creating local and remote database storage for the configured elements.