A Web-Component-Based Cross-Platform Mobile Application Development Environment for Ordinary Users

The rapid progress of the mobile internet has been promoting the popularity of mobile devices, and mobile application development is getting more pervasive. However, state of the art development environments have a high learning barrier for ordinary users. In this paper, we take consideration of ordinary users' requirements and propose a WYSIWYG cross-platform web-component-based mobile applications creation environment for ordinary users. This environment has a WYSIWYG visual editor with drag-and-drop web component. A web component library model is proposed to standardize customized libraries. A cross-platform application model based on composite web components is imported to implement a rapid application build approach with one-click buttons, which helps ordinary users generate installing packages within simple operations for multiple platforms. A native plugin model is proposed to assist web components to invoke native functionalities. The experiment result shows that ordinary users could easily start to create mobile applications in our environment.