AUTOMOBILE

AUTOmatic Code Generation from models For MOBILE Applications

 Partecipanti

Mappa

 Word cloud

Esplora la "nuvola delle parole (Word Cloud) per avere un'idea di massima del progetto.

 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

The release of the iPhone on June 29, 2007 marked the advent of the mobile-dominated post-PC era in IT, which accelerated in 2010 after the introduction of the iPad. In the next few years, this mobile-centric model will further increase, with smartphones and tablets expecting to triple from 2012 to 2015. Users will see a new era of increasingly context-aware, multichannel user experiences and software development organizations will have new business opportunities through direct sales in app stores and delivery of B2E and B2B solutions. But the mobile revolution also brings perils, because a more complex client environment is necessary, spanning mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets) through the desktop and based on a client/cloud model. Enterprises will need to address consumers, citizens, and employees through multiple channels with innovative device capabilities and interactive experiences that will change their core products and services. The AUTOMOBILE project aims at designing and bringing to the market innovative methodologies, software tools, and vertical applications for the cost-effective implementation of cross-platform, multi-device mobile applications, i.e. business applications that can be accessed by users on a variety of devices and operating systems, including PC, cellular / smart phones and tablets. Cross-platform and multi-device design, implementation and deployment is a barrier for today’s IT solution providers, especially SME providers, due to the high cost and technical complexity of targeting development to a wide spectrum of devices, which differ in format, interaction paradigm, and software architecture. AUTOMOBILE will exploit the modern paradigm of Model-Driven Engineering and code generation to dramatically simplify multi-device development, reducing substantially cost and development times, so as to increase the profit of SME solution providers and at the same time reduce the price and total cost of ownership for end-customers.

Introduzione (Teaser)

One of the main barriers to automating the development of mobile applications is the lack of interoperability between the different mobile platforms. EU-funded researchers adopted a new approach to the development of one source code and its automatic transformation for a variety of devices.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

The idea promoted by the EU-funded project 'Automatic code generation from models for mobile applications' (http://automobile.webratio.com/ (AUTOMOBILE)) is to use models to represent applications in a platform-independent manner. Model-driven engineering, or MDE for short, promises to increase automation in programme development for mobile devices, desktop computers and the Web.

Models can be specified in the Interaction Flow Modelling Language (IFML) that AUTOMOBILE researchers have extended to cover various mobile concepts. The increase in automation of programme development is achieved by using model transformations. Higher-level models are transformed into lower-level models until the model becomes executable through code generation.

During the first reporting period, the interpretation of IFML models to software code primitives was completed. Dedicated tools generate HTML5, CSS3 or JavaScript code out of mobile-specific models and wrap it in the Apache Cordova container. The whole code is then sent to the Build Phone Gap online platform to get the final Android and iOS application.

As in each software engineering approach, applicability, effectiveness and efficiency are important aspects of MDE. The AUTOMOBILE partners have tested the new approach on real industrial projects. Modelling of existing applications proved that the extended IFML is expressive enough to cover all typical development needs of mobile-specific applications.

Future work will focus on the implementation of more refined code generators and the evaluation of design patterns for mobile application development. However, MDE consists of more than model languages and code generation tools. It is a software engineering approach that affects the entire lifecycle of an application, from requirements specifications through sustainment.

AUTOMOBILE researchers have addressed the fragmentation of mobile platforms and programming languages with a new approach that simplifies the development of multi-device applications. More importantly, the proposed MDE approach is expected to find applications in different industries, reducing substantially programming efforts and cost.