Building mobile apps for online measuring system

Ngo Huu Phuoc
Nguyen Khac Phu
Nguyen Van Thanh
Pham Thanh Dat

Due to the needs of Phuong Hai’s customers, the first version of Phuong Hai mobile application was released on 21 Feb 2022, for helping them manage and control their laboratory devices more easily. At the time they started to work on the next release of the app, they found that their application could not be used for long-term purposes. Because it seems quite difficult to add new features and maintain the application with the current structure of the source code. Therefore, the goal of the team when participating in this project is to develop a new application based on the old one of Phuong Hai. After several meetings with Phuong Hai company, the team has analysed and defined that currently there are 3 problems that our team need to solve for the new application.

Firstly, the new application needs to have a different design pattern for the structure of code. The project was structured using MVC, this model was created to enable desktop and web developers to divide user interface functionality. However, there are some drawbacks of the model that affect quite a lot to Phuong Hai app such as: Ul is blended with business logic, hard to reuse and implement tests ,increased complexity and inefficiency of data. Therefore, with the advice from Phuong Hai and based on our research, it is much better to use the MVVM (Model–View–ViewModel) as the main structure for the app. Here are some advantages of this design pattern structure: Business logic is decoupled from Ul, easy to maintain and test and reuse components, loosely coupled architecture and easy to write unit test cases. It can resolve the above drawbacks of MVC models and being a suitable structure to apply for the new application. Furthermore, it looks like the industry company seem to prefer this model over any other. 

Secondly, the first version of the old application used a platform called Firebase to handle the job of server and database. This platform is very good to use for a small project because of its conveniences such as: Database capabilities, faster Development, personalization, cost-Effectiveness and ease of integration. However, this is just a short-term solution and when running the project for more than 2 or 3 years the application will have to deal with some serious problems like: limit data storing, limit data migration and platform-dependence. Therefore, the team has asked about the resources that Phuong Hai can provide to help the project for long-term use. Phuong Hai is already prepared and going to deliver a new server to us when it is completed, so it helped my team to save a lot of time for not developing a new server for the mobile app. 



Finally, this problem is also the reason that led to the launch of this project which is to develop new features and functions. The previous app of Phuong Hai only focused on the laboratory devices management part, so it lacked basic features such as: Sign up, user’s profile management and theme mode. These features will be added to the application during the developing process. Besides the basic ones, to help Phuong Hai customers to add new devices to their account quicker the team decided to combine the QR code scanner to the app because of its convenience. Basically, each device bought from Phuong Hai will have its unique QR code which then will be scanned by users and automatically added to their account for management. However, following our plan this feature only be developed and added when the application completed all functionalities same as the old app.