Avaliação de frameworks para o desenvolvimento de aplicações híbridas

Abstract

The widespread use of mobile applications facilitates people’s daily tasks. These applications can help people in a variety of ways, such as social life, communications, entertainment and several others. As a consequence, the demand for this applications is in constant rising creating a huge market for the development of such applications. Most apps target one or more operational system, considering that, developers must build the same applications more than once one for each OS targeted. The cost of development of said applications is high, it must take into account resources, planning, time, maintenance and evolution of each application developed. Targeting two or more OSs will most likely double the price of an application. To mitigate the aforementioned cost problem, mobile application development frameworks were built to provide a base platform to build one single application that can target one or more OS. In spite of being a great solution for developers, it is a challenge to choose the right framework for the task at hand. This work aims to compare frameworks, with the objective to present data for developers to facilitate choosing the right framework for the problem they have. For that, this work presents a systematic mapping aiming to find the main features of a framework looking into related works. Several small applications were also implemented to test some of the native functionalities of each device, and a battery of tests to obtain data about excecution time, memory consumption and use of processing power. Furthermore, a questionaire was created and sent to a community of mobile developers looking to get some opinions from professionals and data that cannot be collected through testing. The results indicate that the most recognized Framework by the respondents was React Native; this framework also presented the fastest development time and is also the most indicated for complex applications. Ionic presented itself as the least recommended framework for complex applications or to use native tools. Flutter had the least median values in the memory consumption and processor usage tests, however the respondents pointed that using a DART as a programming language is a major drawback. Native Script-Vue.js is the least known and used. Nevertheless presented the best mean times for iOS, excluding the Bluetooth mini application.