A Model Driven Approach based on Interaction Flow Modeling Language to Generate Rich Internet Applications

A Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) combine the simplicity of the hypertext paradigm with the flexibility of desktop interfaces. These appliations were proposed as a solution to follow the rapid growth and evolution of the Graphical User Interfaces. However, RIAs are complex applications and their development requires designing and implementation which are time-consuming and the available tools are specialized in manual design. In this paper, we present a model driven approach to generat GUI for Rich Internet Application. The approach exploits the new language IFML recently adopted by the Object Management Group. We used frameworks and technologies known to Model-Driven Engineering, such as Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) for Meta-modeling, Query View Transformation (QVT) for model transformations and Acceleo for code generation. The approach allows to quickly and efficiently generating a RIA focusing on the graphical aspect of the application

Enhancing Interaction Flow Modeling Language Metamodels for Designing Features of Rich Internet Applications

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) became to standard of interactive web applications on the internet fastly. It is a complex application with a rich user interface that distributed the data between client and server also allowing an asynchronous communication between them, but web engineering methods are not able to design and implement these features impeccably. The recent web engineering method is Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) which adopted by Object Management Group (OMG). It has many features for developing interactions in web application compared with other web engineering methods but also has limitation for designing RIA features. In this paper, we enhance IFML method through extension the metamodels by using UML extension mechanism, in which, we define new IFML metamodel and some new elements to cope RIA features designing in data distribution between client and server. The results show that this enhancement enables IFML to develop the new types of web applications efficiently

XANUI: A Textual Platform-Independent Model for Rich User Interfaces

In recent years, several model-driven proposals have defined user interface models that can represent both behavioural and aesthetic aspects. However, the software industry has ignored the majority of these proposals because the quality of the rich user interfaces generated out of these models is usually low and their code generators are not flexible, i.e., the UI templates cannot be customised easily. Furthermore, these proposals do not facilitate the separation between the visual design of the UI, normally performed by graphic designers in the industry, and the visualisation of data, which has been previously modelled using another domain-specific language. This paper proposes a new textual domain-specific language called XANUI, which could be embedded in XML-based UI pages, e.g., HTML or XML. The designed language provides the mechanisms to bind visual components with data structures already existing, and to define the behaviour of these components based on events. In this paper, XANUI is integrated in two OOH4RIA development processes, i.e., the traditional data-intensive and the new design-first process, thus reusing the OOH4RIA models and transformations to generate a complete rich Internet application for any platform or device. In order to validate this approach, the XANUI solution is applied to the development of a RIA with two UI types: a) the administration view of a Web application using HTML5 and AngularJS, and b) a catalogue application for e-Commerce using Windows RT in a Tablet PC

Extending the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) for Model Driven Development of Mobile Applications Front End

International audienceFront-end design of mobile applications is a complex and multidisciplinary task, where many perspectives intersect and the user experience must be perfectly tailored to the application objectives. However, development of mobile user interactions is still largely a manual task, which yields to high risks of errors, inconsistencies and ine ciencies. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach to mobile application development based on the IFML standard. We propose an extension of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language tailored to mobile applications and we describe our implementation experience that comprises the development of automatic code generators for cross-platform mobile applications based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript optimized for the Apache Cordova framework. We show the approach at work on a popular mobile application, we report on the application of the approach on an industrial application development project and we provide a productivity comparison with traditional approaches

Comparative analysis of interaction flow modeling language tools

Modeling approaches based on standards are of paramount importance in the field of front-end design for web and mobile applications. Problems are often encountered during the selection of tools for designing applications for developers and researchers, particularly applications that are related to time and cost in the market and academia. The Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) is a recently standardized modeling language designed for managing the content expression, user interaction and behavior control of front-end applications. IFML brings several benefits to the development process of web and mobile front-end applications. Thus, several tools have been developed for the exploitation of technical artifacts offered by current specifications. In this study, we discuss the tools proposed for modeling IFML to provide a comparative analysis while considering various criteria. The result can be used as a basis of tool selection for specific aspects

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

Developing BP-driven web application through the use of MDE techniques

Model driven engineering (MDE) is a suitable approach for performing the construction of software systems (in particular in the Web application domain). There are different types of Web applications depending on their purpose (i.e., document-centric, interactive, transactional, workflow/business process-based, collaborative, etc). This work focusses on business process-based Web applications in order to be able to understand business processes in a broad sense, from the lightweight business processes already addressed by existing proposals to long-running asynchronous processes. This work presents a MDE method for the construction of systems of this type. The method has been designed in two steps following the MDE principles. In the first step, the system is represented by means of models in a technology-independent manner. These models capture the different aspects of Web-based systems (these aspects refer to behaviour, structure, navigation, and presentation issues). 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