Live Programming of Mobile Apps in App Inventor

Abstract

MIT App Inventor is a programming environment that lowers the barriers to creating mobile apps for Android devices, especially for people with little or no programming experience. App Inventor apps for a mobile device are constructed by arranging components with a WYSIWYG editor in a computer web browser, where the development computer is connected to the device by WiFi or USB. The behavior of the components is specified using a blocks-based graphical programming language. A key feature in making App Inventor accessible to beginning programmers is live programming: developers interact directly with the state of the evolving program as it is being constructed, and changes made in the web browser are realized instantaneously in the running app on the device. This paper describes the live programming features of App Inventor and explains how they are implemented. Keywords: live programming; android; mobile app development; interpretation