Cabana: A Cross-platform Mobile Development System

Mobile application development is a hot topic in computer science education, and debate rages over which platform to develop on and what software to use for development. Cabana is a web-based application designed to enable development on multiple mobile platforms and to make application development easier. It uses an approach to application programming based on a wiring diagram that is supplemented with the ability to program directly using Java Script. It is an ideal choice for application development in introductory computer science courses and for upper-level courses where the focus is on application design and not application programming. This paper introduces Cabana and describes its use in two different computer science courses.