Domain-Specific Modeling and Code Generation for Cross-Platform Multi-Device Mobile Apps

Nowadays, mobile devices constitute the most common computing device. This new computing model has brought intense competition among hardware and software providers who are continuously introducing increasingly powerful mobile devices and innovative OSs into the market. In consequence, cross-platform and multi-device development has become a priority for software companies that want to reach the widest possible audience. However, developing an application for several platforms implies high costs and technical complexity. Currently, there are several frameworks that allow cross-platform application development. However, these approaches still require manual programming. My research proposes to face the challenge of the mobile revolution by exploiting abstraction, modeling and code generation, in the spirit of the modern paradigm of Model Driven Engineering

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical requirements. Moreover, we highlight a business-oriented enhancement that further increases MD2's business practicability. We generalize our findings and sketch the path towards more versatile MDSD of apps

An Empirical Investigation of Performance Overhead in Cross-Platform Mobile Development Frameworks

The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach.publishedVersio

Development of Mobile Applications with Functions in the Cloud through the Model Driven Approach: A Systematic Mapping Study

This work presents a systematic mapping study that analyzes different proposals that apply MDD to the development of MobileApps-FC and that, at the same time, consider the improvement of the portability of such applications. Even though we have identified just a few studies related to our subject of interest, the validation experiences that are presented in them, encourage the adoption of MDD to address portability issues.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

Extending MoWebA for MobileApps with Functions in the Cloud

In this work we propose MoWebA Mobile, an extension of a MDD approach, called MoWebA, for the design and generation of the MobileApps-FC. Specifically, in this work we have focused on a specific aspect of the mentioned applications, which is the network communication between the mobile applications and their functions in the cloud.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

Automating mobile application development: UML-based code generation for Android and Windows Phone

This paper proposes a MDD approach for mobile application development, which includes modeling and code generation strategies for An- droid and Windows Phone. UML class and sequence diagrams are employed for modeling mobile applications and code is generated from this model. To support the automatic code generation, GenCode was re-structured and ex- tended to meet the particularities of these two platforms. As result, GenCode’s current version is able to automatically generate Java-Android and C# codes, according to the specified application model and target platform. Finally, case studies are used to demonstrate the proposed approach, as well as to validate the code generation tool

Achieving Business Practicability of Model-Driven Cross-Platform Apps

-Due to the incompatibility of mobile device platforms such as Android and iOS, apps have to be developed separately for each target platform. Cross-platform development approaches based on Web technology have significantly improved over the last years. However, since they do not lead to native apps, these frameworks are not feasible for all kinds of business apps. Moreover, the way apps are developed is cumbersome. Advanced cross-platform approaches such as MD2, which is based on model-driven development (MDSD) techniques, are a much more powerful yet less mature choice. We discuss business implications of MDSD for apps and introduce MD2 as our proposed solution to fulfill typical requirements. Moreover, we highlight a business-oriented enhancement that further increases MD2's business practicability. We generalize our findings and sketch the path towards more versatile MDSD of app