A holistic approach for cross-platform software development

Cross-platform development solutions can help to make software available on different devices and platforms. But these are normally restricted to preconfigured platforms and consider that each individual solution is equal or similar to each other. As a result, developers have to resort to native development and build individual solutions, one for each device/platform, that cooperate to deliver the desired global functionality. This article presents an approach that takes advantage of existing solutions and have support for extending and including new platforms, and distributing functionality across devices. The approach is based on a general-purpose language that raises the abstraction level in order to keep the software free from platform details. Automatic transformations produce executable code that can be properly divided and deployed separately into different platforms. The proposed approach was evaluated in four ways. In the first evaluation, an existing cross-platform system was recreated using the approach. The second and third evaluations was conducted with expert and novice developers, who tested the approach in practice. The fourth evaluation introduced support for cross-platform testing. Results have brought evidence supporting the following main contributions: use of a single environment, the ability to reuse similar concepts between platforms and the potential to reduce costs. •Most cross-platform development tools only support a predefined set of platforms.•Most cross-platform development tools only generate versions of the entire system.•A model-driven approach for cross-platform software development is proposed.•The proposed approach allows platforms to be extended or included by the developers.•The proposed approach allow the distribution of functionality across platforms.