Automatic code generation for cross-platform, multi-device mobile apps: some reflections from an industrial experience

Umuhoza, Eric; Ed-douibi, Hamza; Brambilla, Marco; Cabot, Jordi; Bongio, Aldo

doi:10.1145/2846661.2846666

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…e authors have opted for the PSM to code strategy, which is widely considered to be the most suitable for describing and representing the app requirements in a given development platform. However, authors in [36] highlighted other code-generation strategies when it comes to MDD approach, such as PIM-to-PSM-to-Native Code, PIM-to-Native Code, PSM-to-Native Code, PIM-to-Cross Platform Code, PIM-to-Cross Platform Framework, and SM-to-Cross Platform Code. e generators are basically based on Xpand (Eclipse Xpand: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xpand), which is a Model to Text Language (MTL) [37] dedicated for code generation based on EMF models.…”

Section: Step 4: Code Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Porting Mobile Apps from iOS to Android: A Practical Experience

Lamhaddab

Lachgar

Elbaamrani

2019

Mobile Information Systems

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The recent rise of smartphones has triggered a revolution in mobile development. As a result of this incremental mobile innovation, new software engineering techniques, software documentation, and tools adapted to the mobile platform remain essential in order to help developers to better understand, analyze, and bootstrap porting mobile applications. In this paper, the authors propose a model-driven reverse-engineering approach based on static analysis, which describes a semantic metamodel of the iOS mobile application and extract design information (such as user interfaces, activity diagram, entities, framework and library dependencies) in order to generate the functional specification documentation and the Android UI skeleton. Thus, aiding the project team, who has in charge porting the app to another mobile platform, to agree upon a consensus on what has to be implemented and safe development cost by auto generating the Android UI skeleton project. To experiment this approach, the authors have implemented a tool called iSpecSnapshot. Moreover, they evaluate the performance of iSpecSnapshot by an experiment involving iOS applications that are ported to Android platform.

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Section: Step 4: Code Generationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Porting Mobile Apps from iOS to Android: A Practical Experience

Lamhaddab

Lachgar

Elbaamrani

2019

Mobile Information Systems

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“…Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) [7] is another modeling language that aspires making modeling and multiplatform code generation more efficient, especially regarding user interfaces and flow of interaction. The approach explained in the paper is different from these in that it does not focus on how the initial model is created but on the WOLD [8] is a wizard for generating forms for data manipulation in databases for different platforms. The WL++ [9] tool aims to generate multi-platform mobile clients to RESTful backends.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Platform Code Generation Supported by Domain-Specific Modeling

Kövesdán¹,

Lengyel²

2017

IJITCS

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Abstract-Code generation is widely used to make software development more efficient and less prone to human errors. A significant use case of code generation is processing of Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and Domain-Specific Models (DSMs). Sometimes, it is desired to generate semantically equivalent or similar functionality to different languages to better support multiple platforms and achieve better reuse in the tooling. For example, it is convenient if a single tool supports code generating from a DSM to either Java or C#. There has been relevant research on using modeling and model transformations for code generation to multiple platforms. The Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) inherently supports multi-platform code generation based on models. Nevertheless, the MDA standard is a high-level general framework that includes standards, notions and principles but does not specify more concrete methods or workflows about their efficient adoption. Our research focuses on the efficient and practically usable application of MDA principles to generate multi-platform code. This paper reports on our results on multi-platform code generation and the difficulties that we are about to addressed in future research. The approach and the challenges presented in the paper are useful for tool developers, such as developers of DSLs, who generates code for several platforms.

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“…Umuhoza et al [17] compared different ways for code generations on mobile development. Their methods do not have specific support for context.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Persistent contextual values as inter-process layers

Raab

2016

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Mobile Development

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Mobile applications today often fail to be context aware when they also need to be customizable and efficient at run-time. Context-oriented programming allows programmers to develop applications that are more context aware. Its central construct, the so-called layer, however, is not customizable. We propose to use novel persistent contextual values for mobile development. Persistent contextual values automatically adapt their value to the context. Furthermore they provide access without overhead. Key-value configuration files contain the specification of contextual values and the persisted contextual values themselves. By modifying the configuration files, the contextual values can easily be customized for every context. From the specification, we generate code to simplify development. Our implementation, called Elektra, permits development in several languages including C++ and Java. In a benchmark we compare layer activations between threads and between applications. In a case study involving a web-server on a mobile embedded device the performance overhead is minimal, even with many context switches.

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Automatic code generation for cross-platform, multi-device mobile apps: some reflections from an industrial experience

Cited by 23 publications

References 12 publications

Porting Mobile Apps from iOS to Android: A Practical Experience

Porting Mobile Apps from iOS to Android: A Practical Experience

Multi-Platform Code Generation Supported by Domain-Specific Modeling

Persistent contextual values as inter-process layers

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