Extending the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) for Model Driven Development of Mobile Applications Front End
Marco Brambilla, A. Mauri, Eric Umuhoza · 2014
Abstract. Front-end design of mobile applications is a complex and multidisciplinary task, where many perspectives intersect and the user experience must be perfectly tailored to the application objectives. How-ever, development of mobile user interactions is still largely a manual task, which yields to high risks of errors, inconsistencies and inefficien-cies. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach to mobile ap-plication development based on the IFML standard. We propose an ex-tension of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language tailored to mobile applications and we describe our implementation experience that com-prises the development of automatic code generators for cross-platform mobile applications based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript optimized for the Apache Cordova framework. We show the approach at work on a popular mobile application, we report on the application of the ap-proach on an industrial application development project and we provide a productivity comparison with traditional approaches. 1