Online model-driven IDE to design GUIs for cross-platform mobile applications

Abstract

The wide variation in features and capabilities of mobile devices lead to difficulties in the development of the same application on different platforms. Therefore we propose an online model-driven integrated development environment to provide developers with a platform-independent GUI design for mobile applications. Our proposed system transforms an abstract platform-independent GUI into a platform-dependent GUI on a target platform. The generated project is entirely in the form with which an experienced developer on the platform is already familiar. Furthermore, as the generated application is not a web-based one, it can access naturally native features of a platform. The proposed flexible architecture enable the capability to handle and update different abstract UI and non-UI controls needed to design GUIs for mobile applications. Experimental results with volunteers show that our proposed solution can save up to 25--51% time to create GUIs of an application to three different platforms of Android, iOS and Windows Phone.