Adaptive Data Collection Front-End - ADaFE

When companies deploy applications whether through app stores or directly on their devices, they often times tend to think that the bulk of the work is done. However seldom is that the case since the maintenance of an application can take up as much time and effort through time as the development. What I proposed to do was build on a different type of system modeling (namely an AOM - Adaptive Object Modeling) architecture minding the caveats posed by mobile design. This should allow even a non technical user to alter front-ends and reflect those changes automatically at runtime (something especially useful in data collection). Based on an AOM model I was able to create a Ruby on Rails web platform where one can input the case-specific entities, properties and so on that make up the system. These are then provided access to via an API. I also developed an Android library that consumes that API and stores its data in an appropriate model so as to ease the 'plugging' of the platform into a running Android application. Finally I wrote an Android app (whose theme is questionnaires) that evinces how useful my tool can be in reducing maintenance and change time and cost. I quickly adapted the web platform so that it would be more user-friendly in handling this specific scenario. What I am missing is applying what I have built to another application - this time a running one so I can show how generic and adaptable the system is - so as to end up with at least two case studies

A Model to Enable the Reuse of Metadata-Based Frameworks in Adaptive Object Model Architectures

The Adaptive Object Model (AOM) is an architectural style in which domain entity types are represented as instances that can be changed at runtime. It can be used to achieve higher flexibility in domain classes. Due to AOM entities having a distinct structure, they are not compatible with most popular frameworks, especially those that use reflection and code annotations. To solve such limitations, this study aims to propose a model that enables the reuse of frameworks designed for classic object-oriented domain models in an AOM application. The proposed model uses dynamically-generated adapters for AOM entities that encapsulate them in a class with the format expected by the frameworks. A reference implementation was developed in the Esfinge AOM RoleMapper framework to evaluate the viability of the proposed model. Initially, to evaluate the solution feasibility, a case study was carried out using the Hibernate framework. Further, an experiment was conducted to assess how the participants perceived the framework functionality reuse through the proposed model. The feasibility study revealed that the solution could be applied in a complex setting for the chosen object-relational mapping frame. It raised some difficulties that can be addressed in future studies. In the experiment, the development time did not present a significant difference compared to the competing approach. Despite the considerable learning curve, most participants considered that the proposed approach has more advantages than the alternative. Based on the evaluations, we can conclude that the proposed model can be successfully employed to use AOM entities with frameworks that were not designed for AOM applications. The possibility of reusing existing frameworks can reduce the effort required to adopt an AOM architecture and, consequently, be a facilitator in implementing more flexible and adaptive approaches