Tooling and system support for authoring multi-device applications

Abstract

This paper presents a development model, tooling environment, and system support for building and deploying applications targeted to run on multiple heterogeneous end-user devices. Our approach is based on a device-independent application model and consists of three elements: (1) an automated process of specialization, by which device-specific versions of the application are generated, (2) support for hand-customization of generated applications, a process we call tweaking, both within our workbench and using external editors, and (3) a designer-in-the-loop process of generalization, by which a generic model is inferred from concrete interface artifacts such as HTML pages. We argue that this approach is cost-effective and results in usable applications that run on a variety of devices.