In Need of a Domain-Specific Language Modeling Notation for Smartphone Applications with Portable Capability

The rapid growth of the smartphone market and its increasing revenue has motivated developers to target multiple platforms. Market leaders, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, develop their smartphone applications complying with their platform specifications. The specification of each platform makes a platform-dedicated application incompatible with other platforms due to the diversity of operating systems, programming languages, and design patterns. Conventional development methodologies are applied to smartphone applications, yet they perform less well. Smartphone applications have unique hardware and software requirements. All previous factors push smartphone developers to build less sophisticated and low-quality products when targeting multiple smartphone platforms. Model-driven development have been considered to generate smartphone applications from abstract models to alleviate smartphones platform fragmentation. Reusing these abstract models for other platforms was not considered because they do not fit new platforms requirements. It is possible that defining smartphone applications using a portability-driven modeling notation would facilitate smartphone developers to understand better their applications to be ported to other platforms. We call for a portability-driven modeling notation to be used within a smartphone development process. Our in-process research work will be manifested through the application of a domain-specific language complying with the three software portability principles and three design factors. This paper aims to highlight our research work, methodology and current statue

Model-Driven Design for the Development of Multi-Platform Smartphone Applications

To ensure revenues, developers of smartphone applications should support all the main leading platforms which share the market thus increasing time-to-market and development cost. To solve this problem, the paper proposes a Model-Driven Design flow to develop a single version of the application that can be automatically translated into the main platform-dependent versions. The approach is based on code generation so that no additional library or process is needed on the smartphone to support different platforms. We introduce a UML2 profile to represent the elements of the application independently of the target platform; the behavior of the application is modeled as a finite-state machine while the graphical user interface is modeled by using classes and objects. A set of translation rules is defined to obtain a platform-dependent representation and then the actual code. The methodology has been validated by creating an application for both the Android and Windows Phone platform and by comparing the obtained code to the corresponding versions written in the traditional way