MobiCloud - Making Clouds Reachable: A Toolkit for Easy and Efficient Development of Customized Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices, as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space, as well as the Cloud space. Our research attempts to exploit the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by introducing MobiCloud, an online toolkit to efficiently develop Cloud-mobile hybrid (CMH) applications. We define a CMH application as a collective application that has a Cloud based back-end and a mobile device front-end. Using a single Domain Specific Language (DSL) script, MobiCloud toolkit is capable of generating a variety of CMH applications. These applications are composed of multiple combinations of native Cloud and mobile applications. Our approach not only reduces the learning curve, but also shields the developers from the complexities of the target platforms. In this paper, we provide a brief description of the MobiCloud toolkit and the workflow.