A cross-platform mobile application is an application that runs on multiple mobile platforms (Android, iOS). Several frameworks, have been proposed to simplify the development of cross-platform mobile applications and, therefore, to reduce development and maintenance costs. Between them, the cross-compiler mobile development frameworks, such as Xamarin from Microsoft, transform the application's code written in intermediate (aka non native) language to native code for each desired platform. However, to our best knowledge, there is no much research about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of those frameworks during the development and maintenance phases of mobile applications. The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to present two datasets of questions and answers (Q&A) related to the development of mobile applications using Xamarin. Secondly, to show their usefulness, we present a replication study for discovering the main discussion topics of Xamarin development. We created the two datasets by mining two Q&A sites: Xamarin Forum and Stack Overflow. Then, for discovering the main topics of the questions from both datasets, we replicated a study that applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Finally, we compared the discovered topics with those topics about general mobile development reported by a previous study. Our datasets have 85,908 questions mined from the Xamarin Forum and 44,434 from Stack Overflow. Between the main topics discovered from those questions, we found that some of them are exclusively related to Xamarin and Microsoft technologies such as the design pattern "MVVM". Both datasets with Xamarin-related Q&A can be used by the research community for understanding the main concerns about developing cross-platform mobile applications using Xamarin. In this paper, we used it for replicating a studying about topic discovering.
翻译:跨平台移动应用程序是多移动平台(Android, iOS)上的一项应用。 已经提出若干框架,以简化跨平台移动应用程序的开发,从而降低开发和维护成本。 其中,如微软Xamarin的Xamarin等交叉合成移动开发框架,将应用程序的中间(非本地)语言代码转换为每个理想平台的本地代码。 然而,据我们所知,对于在移动应用程序的开发和维护阶段使用这些框架的利弊,没有多少研究。 本文的目标是双重的。 首先,提出两个与使用Xamarin的移动应用程序开发有关的问答数据集。 其次,为了显示其实用性,我们提交了一份复制性研究,以发现以中间(非本地)语言编写的每个平台的主要讨论主题。 我们通过挖掘两个“ Xmarain论坛” 和 Stack Overplow 网站创建了两个数据集。 然后,我们从两个数据集中发现了主要问题的主要专题, 我们完全复制了“ Xamrichal” 应用了“ Xal-alal ladeal ladeal” 研究, 我们从“Ledalal ladeal ladeal ladeal ladeal” 和“我们所发现的“Ledal maild” 之间的这些专题, 最后,我们所发现了“Leval ladeal ladeal ladeal” 。