Supporting Heterogeneous Device Development and Communication

To increase market penetration, mobile software makers support their popular applications on all major software platforms, which currently include Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Although these platforms often offer a drastically different look and feel, cross-platform applications deliver the same core functionality to the end user. Maintaining and evolving such applications currently requires replicating all the changes across all supported variants, a laborious and intellectually taxing enterprise. The state-of-the-practice automated source translation tools fall short, as they are incapable of handling the structural and idiomatic differences of the software frameworks driving major mobile platforms.

In addition, popular mobile applications increasingly make use of distributed resources. Certain domains, including social networking, productivity enhancement, and gaming, require different application instances to continuously exchange information with each other. The current state of the art in supporting communication across heterogeneous mobile devices requires the programmer to write platform-specific, low-level API calls that are hard not only to develop but also to evolve and maintain.

This thesis reports on the findings of two complementary research activities, conducted with the goal of facilitating the development and communication across heterogeneous mobile devices: (1) a programming model and runtime support for heterogeneous device-to-device communication across mobile applications; (2) a source code recommendation system that synthesizes code snippets from web-based programming resources, based on the functionality written for Android or iOS and vice versa. The conceptual and practical advancements of this research have potential to benefit fellow researchers as well as mobile software developers and users.