Codeless App Development Evaluating A Cloud-Native Domain-Speciﬁc Functions Approach Chuhao Wu

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Codeless App Development: Evaluating A Cloud-Native Domain-Speciﬁc

Functions Approach

Chuhao Wu

The Pennsylvania State University

cjw6297@psu.edu

Adrian Mos

Naver Labs Europe

adrian.mos@naverlabs.com

Jose Miguel Perez-Alvarez

Naver Labs Europe

jm.perez@naverlabs.com

John M. Carroll

The Pennsylvania State University

jmc56@psu.edu

Abstract

Mobile applications play an important role in the

economy today and there is an increasing trend for app

enablement on multiple platforms. However, creating,

distributing, and maintaining an application remain

expert tasks. Even for software developers, the process

can be error-prone and resource-consuming, especially

when targeting different platforms simultaneously.

Researchers have proposed several frameworks to

facilitate cross-platform app development, but little

attention has been paid to non-technical users. In

this paper, we described the Flow framework, which

takes the advantage of domain-speciﬁc languages to

enable no-code speciﬁcation for app modeling. The

cloud-native coordination mechanism further supports

non-technical users to execute, monitor, and maintain

apps for any target platforms. User evaluations were

conducted to assess the usability and user experience

with the system. The results indicated that users can

develop apps in Flow with ease, but the prototype could

be optimized to reduce learning time and workload.

Keywords: Cross-Platform App Development,

Domain Speciﬁc Language, Model-Driven Software

Development, Cloud Execution, User Experience

1. Introduction

Since the release of Apple’s ﬁrst iPhone in 2007,

the popularity of mobile applications (apps) has grown

rapidly in the last decades. By 2020, there are more than

8.9 million apps available around the world (Koetsier,

2020). Global revenue from mobile applications

increased to more than 318 billion US dollars in 2021

and is estimated to reach around 613 billion by 2025.

Therefore, the presence in app marketplaces is critical

for many individuals in today’s economy.

Nowadays, there are various tools to assist

non-technical people (i.e. people without speciﬁc

technical knowledge) to create websites, yet most of

them only enable static content and app development

still remains a task primarily for programmers. This

high threshold of app development could hinder

non-technical people from growing their business and

suppress their voices in the design and development

of apps. The expensive and time-consuming app

development process can make it difﬁcult for small

businesses to take advantage of the Internet. Therefore,

lowering the barriers for non-technical people will

enable underrepresented population to participate more

actively in the app economy and shape the digital future.

Apps on traditional mobile devices (i.e. smartphones

and tablets) are mostly developed for Android and

iOS. However, the electronic devices owned by users

have been increasing, and there is a trend towards

app-enablement in various devices, including smart

TVs, wearables, voice assistants, etc (Rieger and

Majchrzak, 2017). Native development approach using

tools and languages designed for a speciﬁc platform

will require extensive cost to deploy an app on multiple

platforms. Therefore, cross-platform solutions to

simplify app development have attracted signiﬁcant

attention from practitioners and academia in the past

decades (Rieger and Majchrzak, 2019). Yet empirical

veriﬁcation is demanded for evaluating cross-platform

frameworks, with a particular focus on qualitative

user-oriented research (Biørn-Hansen et al., 2018).

In this study, we addressed the research gaps by

proposing and evaluating a no-code app development

system: Flow, which allows non-technical users to

create interactive apps. In this system, the non-technical

user models or adapts the logic of an app, by using

arXiv:2210.01647v1 [cs.SE] 4 Oct 2022

high-level behavioral models. The novelty of this

system resides in that Flow does not transform these

models into executable code for target platforms.

Instead, Flow executes those models directly on the

cloud, and uses a coordination mechanism with the ﬁnal

app when user-iteration is required. This allows the

creation of generic applications that are can be easily

adapted to different platforms. In this way, Flow makes

it easier for people without technical skills to develop

and maintain applications across platforms. Users do

not need to understand the cloud-based logic and can

simultaneously see the effects of changes they make to

the models.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents

related work in cross-platform app development.

Section 3 introduces the overall architecture and

deﬁnitions of Flow. Section 4 discusses the setup and

results of user evaluation. In Section 5, the implications

of Flow are discussed further before concluding with a

summary in Section 6.

2. Related Work

In general, previous research has distinguished ﬁve

approaches for developing cross-platform applications

(Biørn-Hansen et al., 2018). First, the progressive

web approach essentially develops a web application

optimized for the mobile device screen. The app

cannot be installed on the mobile device and needs

to be executed within a browser app. Progressive

Web Apps (PWA) introduced by Google integrates the

services workers, a manifest ﬁle, and a bundle of static

user interface components not dependent on dynamic

content, which results in a performance comparable

to that of native apps (Biørn-Hansen et al., 2017).

However, even with enhanced capabilities, the access to

device or platform features are still limited for web apps.

The hybrid approach allows developers to develop

mobile apps using web development tools such as

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apache Cordova (Bosnic

et al., 2016) is one of the most popular tools for

developing hybrid apps. It initializes the Native app

with a WebView (embeddable web browser) and the

communication between the WebView and Native code,

enabling the speciﬁcation of business logic through

JavaScript and interfaces through HTML and CSS. In

addition, libraries such as Ionic Framework (Yusuf,

2016) and Sencha Touch (Clark and Johnson, 2013)

facilitate the development of user interfaces (UIs) for

hybrid apps and make them adhering to the guidelines

of the targeted platforms.

By contrast, the interpreted approach relies on a

runtime component, and app developers can access the

underlying functionality through the API (Biørn-Hansen

et al., 2020). The app is typically written using

programming languages such as JavaScript and the

invocation of foreign function interfaces is achieved

through proprietary plugin-based bringing systems (e.g.,

React Native and NativeScript (Brito et al., 2018)).

Consequently, plugin developed for one system may not

work in the other, which fragments the frameworks and

tools and becomes a major drawback for this approach.

The cross-compiled approach maps the input

application to a target platforms through compiling to

Native byte code. The access to Native device features

is exposed to app developers through the Software

Development Kit (SDK) rather than the bridging

components in hybrid and interpreted approaches.

The generated user interfaces are rendered as Native

interface components (Willocx et al., 2015). One

of the most recent cross-compile frameworks is

Google’s Flutter (Windmill, 2020), which recreates the

appearance of user interfaces through Skia Canvas.

The model-driven approach uses the high level

abstract representation to develop apps. It utilizes

textual or graphical Domain Speciﬁc Languages (DSLs)

or the Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) to construct

models. Code generators convert the models into

Native source code for the targeted platforms. Ideally,

the generated apps will be the same as native apps.

Numerous model-driven frameworks exist in both

industry and academia. For example, the MD2

(Heitk¨

otter and Majchrzak, 2013) framework uses

textual DSL to specify the components of an app and

does not require any knowledge of platform-speciﬁc

programming languages. However, most model-driven

frameworks develop distinct DSLs, which makes it

difﬁcult to transfer the knowledge from one to another

(Le Goaer and Waltham, 2013).

Despite the advantages of aforementioned

approaches, most of them are not friendly to

non-technical people. The model-driven approach

may be appropriate for non-technical people, as it does

not require a background in any programming language.

Moreover, there is a lack of usability evaluation in

cross-platform app development research. Rieger

(2018) proposed the M¨

unster App Modeling Language

(MAML) framework and evaluated it with software

developers, process modelers, and domain experts,

resulting in better comprehensibility and usability

than other frameworks. Based on the advantage of

DSLs, our work further improves the experience for

non-technical users by introducing the mechanism

to isolate client-side models from changes on the

server-side, which makes it easier to develop, deploy,

and maintain apps. We conducted a rigorous user

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CodelessAppDevelopment:EvaluatingACloud-NativeDomain-SpecicFunctionsApproachChuhaoWuThePennsylvaniaStateUniversitycjw6297@psu.eduAdrianMosNaverLabsEuropeadrian.mos@naverlabs.comJoseMiguelPerez-AlvarezNaverLabsEuropejm.perez@naverlabs.comJohnM.CarrollThePennsylvaniaStateUniversityjmc56@psu.eduAbstra...

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Codeless App Development Evaluating A Cloud-Native Domain-Speciﬁc Functions Approach Chuhao Wu

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