Cordova Generator: Generación automática de plugins Apache Cordova para Aplicaciones Hibridas

Abstract

In the last few years, the use of smartphones has been increased substantially. For this reason, demand of mobile applications has also grown. On the other hand, the actual market offers devices with very different mobile operating systems, in terms of user experience and development. Therefore, when an application is developed, it is necessary to create a different version of this one for each mobile operating system. This increases time and economic expenses. But, there is another problem, it is necessary to know the development language of each mobile system. On these grounds, in the last few years, it has become necessary to find a solution that allows developers to generate cross platform mobile applications. These new applications are called hybrids and they are developed using web technologies. On the other hand, these applications allow developers to access the mobile hardware by using Apache Cordova plugins. But even these applications have many advantages, their performance is lower than in native application. For this reason, if we want to increase the use of this applications, it must be found a way to improve their performance. A way of solving this problem is using plugins that are developed in native languages as C++. But, both plugin and bridges that communicate hybrid application and native mobile platform, are difficult to generate. In order to solve this problems, a software capable of generating Apache Cordova plugins have been developed in this project. This software works together AlterNative, a tool developed by Alex Albalá and Juan López. This software translates C# code to C++ code and it is responsible for implementing all plugin functions in native code. The proposal of this tool is to generate a code easily to read and modify. This is because the translated code maintains the structure of the input code. So, combining these two softwares, we successfully integrate hybrid applications with high performance native code, which are connected through automatically generated Apache Cordova plugins.