Cross-platform mobile application

Abstract

The purpose of this project is improving and making a hybrid application for CASS-Q. CASS-Q is a client application, which was developed by Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences for Helsinki University. It is used as a tool by the Doctoral Students of Department of Psychology for Contextual Activity Sampling System (CASS) researches about professional and education activities.

CASS-Q client application is initially built using web technologies for example Hypertext Markup Language 5, Cascading Style Sheet as well as JavaScript. AngularJS, a JavaScript framework mainly maintained by Google, is utilized during the implementation of the application. To make a hybrid mobile application based on this browser version, PhoneGap or Apache Cordova framework is used. Apache Cordova gives the means to software developers to build applications for mobile devices using web technologies instead of depending on platform specific application programming interfaces like those in iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

As a result of this project, a mobile application was successfully published. This application is a hybrid mobile application, which was built based on the browser version of CASS-Q, after some modification was made, for example the submit button visibility mechanism and some new features was added, such as the functionalities to take a photo or a video as an answer. Answers are submitted successfully to the server including the media files.

The cross platform mobile application is a huge improvement for CASS-Q application, because in the future, changes need to be done only once and all mobile platforms will have the same changes.