Model-driven design for the development of multi-platform smartphone applications

To ensure revenues, developers of smartphone applications should support all the main leading platforms which share the market thus increasing time-to-market and development cost. To solve this problem, the paper proposes a Model-Driven Design flow to develop a single version of the application that can be automatically translated into the main platform-dependent versions. The approach is based on code generation so that no additional library or process is needed on the smartphone to support different platforms. We introduce a UML2 profile to represent the elements of the application independently of the target platform; the behavior of the application is modeled as a finite-state machine while the graphical user interface is modeled by using classes and objects. A set of translation rules is defined to obtain a platform-dependent representation and then the actual code. The methodology has been validated by creating an application for both the Android and Windows Phone platform and by comparing the obtained code to the corresponding versions written in the traditional way.