211
chapter twelve
Mobile electronic commerce
development
Sathiadev Mahesh
Contents
12.1 Introduction ........................................................................................... 212
12.2 Development methodologies ...............................................................214
12.2.1 Web applications ........................................................................214
12.2.2 Native applications ................................................................... 215
12.2.3 Hybrid ..........................................................................................216
12.3 Mobile applications development platforms .....................................216
12.3.1 Integrated development environment ....................................216
12.3.2 Cloud-based development platforms ..................................... 217
12.3.3 Platform comparison ................................................................ 218
12.3.4 Vendor-supported/vendor-sponsored application
stores .....................................................................................218
12.4 Mobile application technology............................................................ 221
12.4.1 Hardware interaction ............................................................... 221
12.4.2 API intermediary layer ............................................................222
12.4.3 Modularization and hardware dependency .........................222
12.4.4 Version control...........................................................................223
12.5 Mobile user experience ........................................................................ 224
12.5.1 Web pages .................................................................................. 224
12.5.2 Device load management ........................................................225
12.5.3 Touch and haptic technology .................................................. 225
12.5.4 Voice input and output .............................................................226
12.5.5 Gestures and movement .......................................................... 227
12.5.6 Visual and augmented reality ................................................. 228
12.5.7 User attention spans ................................................................. 228
12.5.8 Security ....................................................................................... 229
212 Mobile Electronic Commerce
12.1 Introduction
Mobile device technology is in its growth phase, and there are a wide
variety of mobile devices, with new products being introduced at a rapid
pace. Competing vendors rush to introduce new and innovative fea-
tures, withmuch emphasis placed on user interaction richness. This con-
trastswith developments in mainframe and desktop systems, where most
of the development was focused on benetting from increasing processing
power and storage, with one major shift from the text-based, command
line, interface to the window, icon, mouse, pointer (WIMPy)–based graphic
user interface in the 1980s. The other major paradigm shift in business
computing was the move from in-house computing, with trained employ-
ees accessing systems, to customers directly accessing business systems, as
is the case in e-commerce. Systems developers, building systems for direct
customer access, had to build adequate safeguards to prevent data corrup-
tion and design the interface to meet customer expectations. A dominant
platform arose quickly for business developers with the MS Windows
environment dominating in the case of desktop computing and a combi-
nation of hypertext markup language (HTML) and JavaScript becoming
the dominant web e-commerce environment. This simplied development
and developers could focus on one dominant technology. However, in the
case of mobile computing, there are multiple vendors promoting their own
platforms; in some cases, a single hardware vendor may support multiple
operating systems. Mobile computing places a premium on high intercon-
nectivity, rich multimodal interaction, and user mobility. These features
are rare in conventional systems development, and developers need to
understand the benets and limitations of the technologies used in mobile
computing. In addition, mobile network providers favor some modes of
connectivity over others, making it necessary for developers to alter appli-
cations based on communications network providers. The highly fractured
marketplace makes it challenging to develop mobile electronic commerce
applications that can function effectively on different devices.
Developers may either choose to build and optimize for one plat-
form or build a multiplatform application that provides satisfactory
performance on multiple platforms. This impacts the choice of a suitable
12.6 Testing mobile applications ................................................................. 230
12.7 Mobile web application technologies ................................................. 232
12.7.1 HTML5 ....................................................................................... 232
12.7.2 jQuery ......................................................................................... 233
12.7.3 JavaScript modules ................................................................... 234
12.7.4 Courses ....................................................................................... 234
12.8 Summary ................................................................................................ 235
References ........................................................................................................235
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