Springer LNCS vol. 8640, pp 176-191
Extending the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) for Model Driven Development of Mobile Applications Front End
Marco Brambilla, Andrea Mauri, Eric Umuhoza
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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. However, development of mobile user interactions is still largely a manual task, which yields to high risks of errors, inconsistencies and inefficiencies. In this paper we propose a model-driven approach to mobile application development based on the IFML standard. We propose an extension of the Interaction Flow Modeling Language tailored to mobile applications and we describe our implementation experience that comprises 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 approach on an industrial application development project and we provide a productivity comparison with traditional approaches.
Adopción industrial de la ingeniería del software dirigida por modelos
Fifteen Years of Industrial Model-Driven Development in Software Front-End: from WebML to WebRatio and IFML
Marco Brambilla, Stefano Butti
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This white paper discusses the history behind the standard IFML, recently adopted by the Object Management Group. It shows how the initial proposal called WebML has been an incubator for research and industrial exploitation on conceptual modeling, exploiting existing experiences in the field and continuously addressing new challenges concerning abstractions, methods, tools, and technologies. It summarizes the essence of the approach and it shows the supporting modelling tool WebRatio at work.
IFML: Building the front end of Web and Mobile applications with OMG’s Interaction Flow Modeling Language
Marco Brambilla
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This tutorial focuses on the Domain-specific Language (DSL) called IFML, which has been adopted as a standard by OMG in March 2013. The Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) is designed for expressing content, user interaction and control behaviour of the front-end of software applications, as well as the binding to the persistence and business logic layers. IFML is the missing piece for modeling the front end of software applications and perfectly complements other modeling dimensions in broad system modeling projects. Therefore, IFML works best when integrated with other modeling languages in the MDA suite, such as UML and BPMN. This tutorial illustrates the basic concepts of IFML, presents the design best practices and integration with other modelling languages, and discusses some industrial experiences (also featuring quantitative measures of productivity) achieved by the companion tool WebRatio. At the end of the tutorial, attendees will get a general knowledge about IFML (they will be able to design simple models and to derive models from existing interfaces), will be able to associate front-end design with system modelling at large, will see the associated MDE tool WebRatio at work, and will get a glimpse of real-life industrial applications developed for large enterprises. This will let them appreciate the advantages of a model-driven development approach at work within large-scale industrial project.
Other Papers:
- Andrea Salini, Ivano Malavolta, Fabrizio Rossi. Leveraging Web Analytics for Automatically Generating Mobile Navigation Models. Mobile Services 2016
- R Acerbis, A Bongio, S Butti, M Brambilla. Model-driven development of cross-platform mobile applications with WebRatio and IFML. MobileSoft 2015
- Roberto Rodriguez-Echeverria, Victor M. Pavón, Fernando Macías, Jose Maria Conejero, Pedro J. Clemente, Fernando Sánchez-Figueroa. IFML-based Model-Driven Front-End Modernization. ISD 2014
- C Bernaschina, M Brambilla, T Koka, A Mauri, E. Umuhoza. Integrating Modeling Languages and Web Logs for Enhanced User Behavior Analytics. WWW 2017