Building Mobile Apps by Ordinary Users: A Service-Brick-Based Approach

Abstract

To build an effective, efficient, and easy-to-use mobile service composition and delivery approach for ordinary users, in this research, we propose a framework, called CARSB (Composite App with RESTful service and Service Bricks), to create mobile Apps based on Service Bricks and RESTful services. Three main features are offered by the CARSB framework, including (1) Service Brick, a rectangular UI component used for the display of specific information, is introduced as the basic building block; (2) a mobile service composition framework, which can integrate Service Bricks with local resources or RESTful services in the cloud, is devised; and (3) a web-based software tool, called CARSB Portal, is provided to allow ordinary users to build their customized composite mobile applications, either Web-based or Android-based, according to their requirements. Besides, in this research, quantitative experiments were conducted to verify the proposed CARSB approach. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed CARSB approach is able to achieve a considerable decrease in user operation time and network transmission load.