A MDA-Based Model-Driven Approach to Generate GUI for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Developing applications for mobile platforms is a compound task, due to variability of mobile OSs and the number of different devices that need to be supported. Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach could provide a possible solution to offer an automated way to generate a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for such applications. In this paper, we propose a MDA-based model-driven approach to generate the GUI for mobile applications. The adopted approach consists of four main steps (i) modeling the GUI under UML; (ii) transforming the obtained diagrams to a simplified XMI schema; (iii) model-to-model transformation; and (iv) model-to-code generation. Our method has the advantages to give a graphical way for designing under UML. Currently, the method has been implemented to support two platforms Android and BlackBerry. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated via a case study that illustrates the GUI code generation for mobile platforms.