Codeless App Development: Evaluating A Cloud-Native Domain-Specific Functions Approach

Mobile applications play an important role in the economy today and there is an increasing trend for app enablement on multiple platforms. However, creating, distributing, and maintaining an application remain expert tasks. Even for software developers, the process can be error-prone and resource-consuming, especially when targeting different platforms simultaneously. Researchers have proposed several frameworks to facilitate cross-platform app development, but little attention has been paid to non-technical users. In this paper, we described the Flow framework, which takes the advantage of domain-specific languages to enable no-code specification for app modeling. The cloud-native coordination mechanism further supports non-technical users to execute, monitor, and maintain apps for any target platforms. User evaluations were conducted to assess the usability and user experience with the system. The results indicated that users can develop apps in Flow with ease, but the prototype could be optimized to reduce learning time and workload.