Model-Driven Development of Mobile Information Systems

Abstract

Significant improvements in the development of business applications for mobile devices have been made in recent years. However, the state of the art in software development is for mobile computing still not as mature as it is for conventional information systems on desktop computers. Therefore, declarative and code generation approaches should be preferred instead of manually coding. In the BAMOS project an architecture has been designed and implemented for the generic and flexible development of mobile information systems. The architecture is based on the declarative description of the available services and enables the access to service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems for mobile devices. In this chapter, the authors present a model-driven approach for generating almost the complete source code of mobile services. By applying model-driven development, a new service can be conveniently modeled with a graphical modeling tool and the graphical models are then used to generate the corresponding XML descriptions of the mobile user interface and the workflow specification. In order to use such a service no specific source code has to be implemented on the mobile device. In addition, an alternative modeling approach based on a textual representation of the models using a formal grammar expressed in EBNF is presented.