Creating, Debugging, and Testing Mobile Applications with the IPAC Application Creation Environment

Introduction

In Computer Science applications, software components should be developed in order to provide more intelligence in the produced systems. However, users, lacking experience with programming languages are not able to write productive software components.

In such cases, Application Creation Environments (ACEs) play a critical role in building and testing software components. With these tools, developers can efficiently design software components as they can utilize a number of editing facilities without the need of using a conventional programming language. In general, ACEs contain: a) a source code editor, b) a debugger, and c) application building automation tools. Software components are developed for a specific domain. Therefore, the vast majority of programming languages do not provide an efficient solution. In this case, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) (Schmidt, 2006) can provide a number of advantages. MDE is a software development methodology, aiming to increase efficiency in developing applications for a specific domain, through the creation of appropriate models. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) (Mernik et al., 2005) follow the principles of MDE development and can provide a number of advantages in cases of limited programming knowledge. A DSL is a language designed to solve problems that arise in a particular field of application, targeting more specific tasks than classic programming languages. DSLs provide the means for describing parameters for a domain of interest having a concrete syntax. Several semantic models are used for the description of the problem. These semantics lead to the automatic generation of specific tools used for the creation of the final code, which could be in a general purpose programming language (e.g. Java). In DSL tools, there are specific methodologies for the definition of the semantics of each language. Compared to general-purpose languages they offer better expressiveness in their specific focus domain. The most significant advantage of DSLs is that they provide users with the capability to write domain specific programs more easily. These programs are independent of the underlying platform, which is another advantage.

However, developing applications with a DSL also presents some disadvantages. The most important is that there are not any commonly used debuggers for DSLs. A primary reason for this fact is that DSLs are oriented to specific domains and generic debuggers cannot be used. Hence, the development of debugging facilities for DSLs is necessary. Based on such tools, users will be capable of debugging the source code of their applications. The debugger should be DSL-oriented, covering all of the language elements. Another disadvantage is that applications developed for embedded systems should be emulated prior to final deployment. Through emulation, developers can identify possible errors, as well as performance issues. However, as in the case of debuggers, there are not any generic emulators that can be adapted to every DSL.