Research On Mobile-App User Interface Modeling And Transformation Method Based On Model Driven Architecture

In order to support various mobile platforms(Android,iOS,etc.)existing in the market,it is necessary to develop multiple versions of the same mobile application.Although the user interface and processing logic of each version are basically the same,different technologies must be used to design and implement it.The development of the mobile app's user interface(mobile user interface)is a high-cost and time-consuming task,the LOC of which account for a large proportion in the LOC of entire application.The mainstream mobile user interface development which has a close relationship with the specific programming language is geared towards the running platform with manual coding.This kind of development approach has some disadvantages such as low efficiency,high cost for maintenance and poor portability.Therefore,effective method for cross-platform mobile user interface development need to be studied.By learning from Model Driven Architecture(MDA),a development method for mobile user interface based on MDA is studied for mobile user interface development on multi-platform which improves the abstraction level of mobile user interface.Firstly,the mobile user interface is defined at a high level of abstraction and the conceptual model or platform-independent model(PIM)is obtained.Then the user interface was refined and transformed gradually by adding corresponding details of platform.Finally,the user interface at a low abstract level named platform-specific model(PSM)is obtained.The conceptual modeling and model transformation methods are the focus of this thesis.The main research works are as follows:(1)The mobile user interface conceptual modeling language was defined.This modeling language,an improvement on the basis of Mobile IFML,is specially used to represent the mobile user interface conceptual model.The meta-model of mobile user interface conceptual modeling language was defined in the form of Ecore class diagram.The integrity constraints were defined in OCL language.A set of graphical notations and corresponding connection rules were designed as the concrete syntax of the conceptual modeling language.(2)Mapping rules from mobile user interface conceptual model to platform specific user interface code were defined and the transformation algorithm was designed.The target specific platform is Android in this thesis.By analyzing the structure of the conceptual model file and the target Android code file,the correspondence between the element in mobile user interface conceptual model and the element in Android code was studied.The mapping rules were defined formally in the form of first order predicate logic and then the transformation algorithm was designed.Mapping rules and transformation algorithm were implemented in template-based language.(3)The software tool prototype supporting mobile user interface conceptual modeling and model transformation was designed and implemented based on Eclipse platform.With this tool,users can focus on requirement analysis and conceptual design of the user interface regardless of the technical details of the implementation platform and then platform-specific code can be generated automatically or semi-automatically.With an example,the model-driven mobile user interface development method and its operating results were demonstrated and illustrated.