GUI code generation for Android applications using a MDA approach

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 provide an automated way to generate a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for such applications. In this paper, we propose an approach based on MDA, to generate GUI for mobile applications on smartphones. The adopted approach consists of three main steps (i) analyzing and modeling the GUI under UML; (ii) transforming the obtained diagrams to a simplified XMI schema using JDOM API; and (iii) generating the GUI based on MDA. Our method has the advantages to generate automatically GUI for several platforms, and gives a graphical way for designing in UML.