Treffer: Using a Framework to develop Client-Side App : A Javascript Framework for cross-platform application

This project aims to study the comfort of using a framework to develop client side applications based on Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript technology. The application tends to serve both as a web client application and a mobile client application for multiple platforms. A survey answering application which fetches questions (texts) from an Application Programming Interface (API) in the application server and uploads text, sound, video and picture answer to the server was built to test the framework on. The application serves as a client application for Contextual Activity Sampling System (CASS) developed by Metropolia University of Applied Sciences for the Doctoral Students of Department of Psychology of Helsinki University. The Doctoral students use the System to study Human behavior for different researches. Helsinki University is also a contractor for CASS client (CASS-Q) project. AngularJS, an open source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google Incorporation is the chosen framework. It was released in 2009 and has evolved with many modules developed by the community. The results of this study suggests that the easy to learn framework can be a very good choice to solve global variable scope issue present in applications developed using most of the other JavaScript libraries. The Doctoral students sensed a great benefit of cross-platform CASS client as compared to that of the only Android Native Client they had earlier. Though the web client developed during this project could only upload text answers, they found it already usable for their researches which required only text answers. The mobile device application versions, which has not been released yet, will able them to receive media files too.