VANILLA Framework for Model Driven Re- Engineering of Declarative User Interface

Abstract

A wide assortment of smart phone devices from different manufacturers that vary in platform, memory, processing capability screen size, screen resolution and compatibilities to different systems is available in today’s market. To meet the ever growing demand of accessing websites and web application through the mobile devices, these web applications are being re-engineered to be acceptable in terms of cost and time. The usability of these web applications is highly dependent on the user interface. In this work, a platform independent Vanilla Framework is presented that uses model as the primary artifact. Model to model transformation is carried out from platform specific model to platform independent model. A detailed analysis of the existing metamodel-based transformation tools is done for the declarative model using an exhaustive criterion. The evaluation of the chosen tools is done which are open source and have download page available using search engine like Google Scholar and Github; like UML–RSDS, Tefkat, JTL, PTL etc. The analysis is performed over ten different parameters like language, model query, compatibility, cardinality etc. Based on the result of the evaluation and extensive investigation, a PIM for declarative user interface is proposed. Also the framework for model transformation using PIM model for declarative user interface has been put forward.  This framework is then applied to five of the popular libraries such as SWING, HTML5, and more recent libraries of Android and Python-Tkinter. Results show that all selected tools produce domain specific target model which mostly transform PIM to PSM and none produces domain independent target model transforming a PSM into PIM.