MobiCloUP!: a PaaS for cloud services-based mobile applications

摘要

The integration of cloud computing and mobile computing has recently resulted in the Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) paradigm which is defined as the availability of \(c\)loud services over a mobile ecosystem. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a model of cloud computing that refers to high-level software systems delivered over Internet. This model typically enables developers to deliver Web applications as Software as a Service. With the aim of providing support to the MCC, in this work a PaaS called MobiCloUP! is proposed for mobile Web and native applications based on third-party cloud services such as Netflix, Instagram and Pinterest, to mention but a few. Unlike other commercial solutions such as force.com, Google\(^{\mathrm{TM}}\) App Engine and other academic proposals like MOSAIC, MobiCloUP! implements an automatic code generation programming model targeting rich mobile applications based on both Web standards such as HTML5, CSS3 and AJAX and Rich Internet Application frameworks like Adobe\(^{\textregistered }\) Flex. The MobiCloUP! core is a wizard tool that covers design, publish/deployment, development and maintenance phases for mobile development life-cycle. In order to validate our proposal, Web 2.0 services-based Web and native mobile applications were developed and deployed to the Cloud using MobiCloUP!. Finally, a qualitative-comparative evaluation was performed in order to validate the legitimacy of our proposal against other similar commercial proposals.