UML-based enhanced rich form generation

Abstract

The Model Driven Development (MDD) has provided a new way of engineering today's rapidly changing requirements into the implementation. However, the development of the user interface (UI) part of an application has not benefited much from MDD although today's UIs are complex software components and play an essential role in the usability of an application. It is a common practice that developers create view forms manually by referring to entity beans to determine their content. However, such kind of manual creation is very error-prone and thus makes the system maintenance difficult. One promise in MDD is that we can generate code from UML models, but existing design models in MDD does not capture enough information that are required to generate desired UI fragments. This paper presents our approach addressing these issues. The approach makes it possible to generate complex UIs, rich view forms, that fully satisfy both designers and end-users and to enforce system access control.