Naked objects versus traditional mobile platform development: a comparative case study

It has been suggested that use of the naked objects pattern could contribute to business agility of applications and reduce the amount of the application code up to 75 percent in a desktop environment. Very little empirical evidence exists to support these claims, however. This paper reports results of a study where two agile software development projects created the same mobile application using two different technologies. The first project did the development using the traditional mobile platform, and the second project used the naked objects framework. Both projects used the same agile software development process. The results show that naked objects produced 79% less application code and 91% less user interface code. Yet, the version of the naked objects framework used was not found to be mature enough for proper implementation of all required functionality. It is concluded that, if further developed, naked objects can be a very potential technical development platform for business-oriented applications. Implications of the study are addressed.