Science & engineering software migration: moving from desktop to mobile applications

The proliferation of mobile devices over the last years provides opportunities and challenges for solving problems in Science & Engineering. Among other novel features, mobile devices contain global positioning sensors, wireless connectivity, built-in web browsers and photo/video/voice capabilities that allow providing highly localized, context aware applications. Mobile phones have become as powerful as any desktop computer in terms of applications they can run. However, the software development in mobile computing is still not as mature as it is for desktop computer and the whole potential of mobile devices is wasted. A current problem in the engineering community is the adaptation of desktop applications for mobile technologies. To take advantage of new platform technologies, existing software must evolve. A number of solutions have been proposed to deal with this problem such as redevelopment, which rewrites existing applications, or migration, which moves the existing system to a more flexible environment while retaining the original system data and functionality. A good solution should be to restore the value of the existing software, extracting knowledge and exploiting investment in order to migrate to new software that incorporates the new technologies. On the one hand, traditional reverse engineering techniques can help in the software migration to mobile applications. They are related to the process of analyzing available software with the objective of extracting information and providing high-level views on the underlying code. On the other hand, to achieve interoperability with multiple platforms the migration needs of technical frameworks for information integration and tool interoperability such as the initiative of the Object Management Group (OMG) called Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The outstanding ideas behind MDA are separating the specification of the system functionality from its implementation on specific platforms and managing the software evolution from abstract models to implementations increasing the degree of automation. The objective of this paper is to describe a reengineering process that allow moving existing desktop applications for solving engineering problems of multidisciplinary character to mobile platforms. Our research aims to simplify the creation of applications for mobile platforms by integrating traditional reverse engineering techniques, such static and dynamic analysis, with MDA. We validated our approach by using the open source application platform Eclipse, EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework), EMP (Eclipse Modeling Project) and the Android platform

Science & engineering software migration: moving from desktop to mobile applications

The proliferation of mobile devices over the last years provides opportunities and challenges for solving problems in science and engineering. Among other novel features, mobile devices contain global positioning sensors, wireless connectivity, built-in web browsers and photo/video/voice capabilities that allow providing highly localized, context aware applications. Mobile phones have become as powerful as any desktop computer in terms of applications they can run. However, the software development in mobile computing is still not as mature as it is for desktop computer and the whole potential of mobile devices is wasted [7, 8]

Migrating C/C++ Software to Mobile Platforms in the ADM Context

Software technology is constantly evolving and therefore the development of applications requires adapting software components and applications in order to be aligned to new paradigms such as Pervasive Computing, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. In particular, many desktop software components need to be migrated to mobile technologies. This migration faces many challenges due to the proliferation of different mobile platforms. Developers usually make applications tailored for each type of device expending time and effort. As a result, new programming languages are emerging to integrate the native behaviors of the different platforms targeted in development projects. In this direction, the Haxe language allows writing mobile applications that target all major mobile platforms. Novel technical frameworks for information integration and tool interoperability such as Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) can help to manage a huge diversity of mobile technologies. The Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force (ADMTF) was formed to create specifications and promote industry consensus on the modernization of existing applications. In this work, we propose a migration process from C/C++ software to different mobile platforms that integrates ADM standards with Haxe. We exemplify the different steps of the process with a simple case study, the migration of “the Set of Mandelbrot” C++ application. The proposal was validated in Eclipse Modeling Framework considering that some of its tools and run-time environments are aligned with ADM standards

Migrating C/C++ Software to Mobile Platforms in the ADM Context

Software technology is constantly evolving and therefore the development of applications requires adapting software components and applications in order to be aligned to new paradigms such as Pervasive Computing, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things. In particular, many desktop software components need to be migrated to mobile technologies. This migration faces many challenges due to the proliferation of different mobile platforms. Developers usually make applications tailored for each type of device expending time and effort. As a result, new programming languages are emerging to integrate the native behaviors of the different platforms targeted in development projects. In this direction, the Haxe language allows writing mobile applications that target all major mobile platforms. Novel technical frameworks for information integration and tool interoperability such as Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) can help to manage a huge diversity of mobile technologies. The Architecture-Driven Modernization Task Force (ADMTF) was formed to create specifications and promote industry consensus on the modernization of existing applications. In this work, we propose a migration process from C/C++ software to different mobile platforms that integrates ADM standards with Haxe. We exemplify the different steps of the process with a simple case study, the migration of “the Set of Mandelbrot” C++ application. The proposal was validated in Eclipse Modeling Framework considering that some of its tools and run-time environments are aligned with ADM standards

Reducing the Energy Consumption of Mobile Applications Behind the Scenes

Abstract—As energy efficiency has become a key consideration in the engineering of mobile applications, an increasing number of perfective maintenance tasks are concerned with optimizing energy consumption. However, optimizing a mobile application to reduce its energy consumption is non-trivial due to the highly volatile nature of mobile execution environments. Mobile applications commonly run on a variety of mobile devices over mobile networks with divergent characteristics. Therefore, no single, static energy consumption optimization is likely to yield across-the-board benefits, and may even turn to be detrimental in some scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach to perfective maintenance of mobile applications to reduce their energy consumption. The maintenance programmer declaratively specifies the suspected energy consumption hotspots in a mobile application. Based on this input, our approach then automatically transforms the application to enable it to offload parts of its functionality to the cloud. The offloading is highly adaptive, being driven by a runtime system that dynamically determines both the state-to-offload and its transfer mechanism based on the execution environment in place. In addition, the runtime system continuously improves its effectiveness due to a feedback-loop mechanism. Thus, our approach flexibly reduces the energy con-sumption of mobile applications behind the scenes. Applying our approach to third-party Android applications has shown that it can effectively reduce the overall amount of energy consumed by these applications, with the actual numbers ranging between 25% and 50%. These results indicate that our approach represents a promising direction in developing pragmatic and systematic tools for the perfective maintenance of mobile applications. I

Migración de software C/C++ a plataformas móviles a partir de MDD (Model Driven Development)

Actualmente los dispositivos móviles acompañan a los usuarios en todo momento y lugar, y se prevé que serán el principal medio de acceso a Internet en los próximos años, sin embargo, el desarrollo de aplicaciones de software móviles no está lo su cientemente maduro. La proliferación de diferentes plataformas móviles ha forzado a los desarrolladores a de nir enfoques que permitan simpli car el desarrollo de aplicaciones . Los autores remarcan que dos de los principales desafíos de la ingeniería de software de aplicaciones móviles son por un lado, la creación de interfaces de usuario que abarquen diferentes clases de dispositivos móviles y por otro, brindar aplicaciones reutilizables en múltiples plataformas. Desarrollar una aplicación de software para un dispositivo móvil implica adoptar y entender las características de estos dispositivos y sus restricciones. Si bien éstos cuentan con características avanzadas también se presentan importantes restricciones. Por ejemplo, incorporan interfaces de entrada más intuitivas, usualmente, pantallas táctiles, bases de datos integradas, soporte multimedia y mecanismos de comunicación y geolocalización. También se presentan importantes restricciones en cuanto al tamaño de la pantalla disponible, capacidad de procesamiento, la utilización de memoria primaria y las bibliotecas de desarrollo disponibles .Ingeniero en Sistema

A novel energy-driven computing paradigm for e-health scenarios

A first-rate e-Health system saves lives, provides better patient care, allows complex but useful epidemiologic analysis and saves money. However, there may also be concerns about the costs and complexities associated with e-health implementation, and the need to solve issues about the energy footprint of the high-demanding computing facilities. This paper proposes a novel and evolved computing paradigm that: (i) provides the required computing and sensing resources; (ii) allows the population-wide diffusion; (iii) exploits the storage, communication and computing services provided by the Cloud; (iv) tackles the energy-optimization issue as a first-class requirement, taking it into account during the whole development cycle. The novel computing concept and the multi-layer top-down energy-optimization methodology obtain promising results in a realistic scenario for cardiovascular tracking and analysis, making the Home Assisted Living a reality

A formal approach to automatically analyse extra-functionalproperties in mobile applications.

This paper presents an integrated approach for testing mobile applications (apps) against a set of extra-functional properties to be used by app developers. The approach starts with the (manual or automatic)extraction of the interaction model, that is, a formal model of the potential user interactions with the app.The model is constructed to allow a model checking tool to exhaustively extract the so-called app user flows, that is, the sequences of user actions, that constitute the test cases. In the final step, the app user flows are executed on the app running on real devices. The resulting execution traces are enriched with different measures and verified against a set of extra-functional properties of interest. The approach has been adapted to analyse several applications running at the same time with several devices supporting the applications.This paper presents the definition and formalization of both the modelling language for the interaction model and the specification language to represent the extra-functional properties. It also describes a methodology for automatically extracting the model. Finally, it presents an implementation focused on Android apps, which is integrated in the TRIANGLE testing framework, and the evaluation of the approach.Work is partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness projectTIN2015-67083-R. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 688712 (TRIANGLE project)