A Framework for iOS Application Development
Youcong Ni
State Key Lab of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Faculty of Software Fujian Normal University, Fujian, China
Email: youcongni@foxmail.com
Bei Chen
Faculty of Software Fujian Normal University, Fujian, China
Email: cbfjnu@gmail.com
Peng Ye
College of Mathematics and Computer, Wuhan Textile University, Hubei, China
Email: whuyp@126.com
Chunyan Wang
Faculty of Software Fujian Normal University, Fujian, China
Email: wcychunyanwcy@gmail.com
Abstract—In order to improve efficiency and quality of
mobile application development on the iOS platform, this
paper proposes a framework named AF4iOS, which is
designed based on class libraries and existing software
frameworks on iOS platform. The AF4iOS framework is
divided into three independent layers: user interface (UI)
layer, domain layer and resource layer. The AF4iOS
framework encompasses a variety of components, which
encapsulate the usage, and accessing of various resources,
such as UI, data, web service and communication. These
extensible and reusable components can accelerate the
progress of development and enhance the quality of product.
Finally, the availability and effectiveness of the AF4iOS
framework is demonstrated through a case study.
Index Terms—Application Framework, iOS Application
Development
I. INTRODUCTION
At the 2011 World Wide Developer’s Conference,
Steve Jobs announced that Apple had sold over 200
million iOS devices, with over 225 million registered
customers. These customers have downloaded over 14
billion apps so far, resulting in over $2.5 billion paid to
iOS developers over the last three years [1]. In 2013,
there are 7.1 billion people in the world and number of
mobile subscriptions is almost 6.8 million [2]. At present,
the number of iOS apps in the Apple’s App Store has
already been more than 700,000 and is still growing. In
such competitive environment, iOS apps should be
quickly developed and deployed in order to obtain and
maintain competitive advantage. Meanwhile, these apps
must meet the increasingly strict quality requirements of
App Store. As a result, iOS apps must be developed
efficiently and keep high quality.
Software framework plays important role in improving
efficiency and quality of apps development [3]. Many
frameworks or middlewares [4, 5] for specific mobile
computation domains has been proposed. Based on class
libraries of iOS, there are a few of open source software
frameworks [6], which encapsulate the usage and
accessing of specific resources in order to ease the iOS
apps development difficulty level. For example,
MagicalRecord framework can provide capability to
simply access database resource through encapsulating
CoreData [7] class library. Web resources can be
conveniently accessed by means of AFNetworking
framework worked on CFNetwork [8] class library.
However, how to integrate existing software frameworks
to form unified iOS apps development framework have
not been well solved.
Aim at this problem, the framework, named AF4iOS,
is proposed in this paper. The AF4iOS framework,
designed on the basis of iOS class libraries [9] and
related open source software frameworks [10], is divided
into three independent layers: user interface (UI) layer,
domain layer and resource layer. In the AF4iOS
framework, a variety of components that encapsulate the
usage and accessing of various resources [11], such as UI,
data, web service, and communication are encompassed.
And these extensible and reusable components can
accelerate the progress of development and enhance the
quality of product [12].
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
the next section, the AF4iOS framework is illustrated in
detail; Section 3 demonstrates applicability of AF4iOS
through a case study; Finally, Section 4 concludes the
paper and future works.
II. A
F4IOS FRAMEWORK
The AF4iOS framework, shown in Fig. 1, is split into
three layers by the layered architecture pattern [13]: user
interface (UI) layer, domain layer and resource layer. UI
JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 9, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2014
doi:10.4304/jsw.9.2.398-403