Auto-generation of rich Internet applications from visual mock-ups

Capturing and communicating software requirements accurately and quickly is a challenging activity. This needs expertise of people with unique skills. Traditionally this challenge has been compounded by assigning specialist roles for requirements gathering and analysis, design, and implementations. These multiple roles have resulted in information loss mainly due to miscommunication between requirement specialists, designers and implementers. Large enterprises have managed the information loss by using document centric approaches, leading to delays and cost escalations. But documentation centric and multiple role approaches are not suitable for Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) because they are vulnerable to market competitions. Moreover, SMEs require effective online applications to provide their service. Hence the motivation for carrying out this research is to explore the possibilities of empowering requirement specialists such as Business Analysts’ (BAs) to take on additional responsibilities of designers and implementers to generate web applications. In addition, SME owners and BAs can communicate better if they perceive the application requirements using a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) approach. Hence, this research explores the design and development of mock-up-based auto-generating tool to develop SME applications. A tool that auto-generates an application from a mock-up should have the capacity to extract the essential implementation details from the mock-up. Hence a visual mock-up language was created by extending existing research on meta-models of UIs for a class of popular modern web-based business applications called Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The popularity of RIAs is due to their distinctive client-side processing power with desktop application like responsiveness and look and feel. The mock-ups drawn with the mock-up language should have sufficient level of details to auto-generate RIAs. To support this, the mock-up language includes constructs for specifying a RIA’s mock-up in terms of layouts and the widgets within them. In addition, the language uses annotations on the mock-up to specify the behaviour of the system. In such an approach the only additional effort required of a Business Analyst is to specify the requirements in terms of a mock-up of the expected interfaces of the SME application. Apart from the mock-up language, a tool was designed and developed to auto-generate the desired application from the mock-up. The tool is powered by algorithms to derive the database structure and the client-side and server-side components required for the auto-generated application. The validation of the mock-up language and auto-generating tool was performed by BAs to demonstrate its usability. The measurement and evaluation results indicate that the mock-up language and the auto-generator can be used successfully to help BAs in the development of SME application and thereby reduce delays, errors and cost overruns. The important contributions of this research are: (i) the design of a mock-up language that makes it easy to capture the structure and behaviour of SME web applications. (ii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the expected database schema from a visual mock-up. (iii) algorithms for automatic derivation of the client and server-side application logic. (iv) application of an existing measurement and evaluation process for the usability testing of the mock-up language and the auto-generated application. This research followed the Design Science Research (DSR) method for Information System to guide the IS design and to capture the knowledge created during the design process. DSR is a research method useful in solving wicked problems requiring innovative solutions for incomplete, contradictory or changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. This research opens new ways of thinking about web application development for future research. Specifically, mock-ups with few easy to understand annotations can be used as powerful active artifacts to capture the structure and behaviour of applications not just of small but also large enterprises. Auto-generating tools can then create fully functional and usable applications holistically from such mock-ups, thereby reducing delays and cost overruns during software engineering

Enabling the generation of web applications from mockups

Mockups are widely used to elicit and validate user requirements in web appli- cations, and several intuitive tools have been developed in recent years, actively involving the end user in the requirements solicitation process. However, most current web development approaches and tools discard mockups after the information-gathering process, abandoning the opportunity to exploit under- lying information in them for autogenerating functional web applications. To overcome this limitation, we have devised a method for deriving the database schema and the logic of the web application from the information contained within mockups. In particular, the method gathers clues on how to organize the data and the control flow of the web application by analyzing the structure and relationships of the widgets in the mockup. Based on the proposed method, we have implemented a tool supporting the generation of web applications abiding by the model-view-controller architectural pattern. The tool has been evalu- ated by involving several end users in the development of web applications for different domains