Fast android application development with component modeling

Abstract

Application of mobile and cyber-physical systems play an important role in cognitive infocommunications, especially in the Socio-Cognitive ICT area, because they are able to facilitate the requested information to users quickly. The Android platform is a good foundation for such systems since it runs on a wide variety of devices and provides some advanced mechanisms for integrating loosely coupled components. These capabilities facilitate efficient component-based development. However, these mechanisms also introduce some difficulties into the development process. On one hand, some functionalities are not encapsulated into a single piece of code but have to be implemented and configured at several distinct source files. On the other hand, it is easy to break the consistency among these artefacts. In this paper, we report on our work in progress tool, which addresses these issues by modeling commonly used functionalities in Android applications and generating a skeleton for the implementation. We also report on the design of this tool. The tool and the experiences of its development will be useful for software developers that aspire to create code generators and cognitive infocommunications related mobile applications based on the Android platform.