Focusing Graphical User Interfaces in Model-Driven Software Development

Abstract

-To meet fast changing demands on modern software architectures the ambition to shorten and improve software development processes has increased. The approach of model-driven software development focuses models as specification of software and on transformations of those models to finally get source code. The advantage of the model-driven approach still has to be proven because a continuous toolsupported transformation process from model to source code with regard to all aspects of a software system is not yet possible. This paper concentrates on the aspect of user interaction by presenting an easy to apply approach allowing for a toolsupported, model-driven software development of graphical user interfaces for any kind of platform. A case study demonstrates the usage and benefit of our model-driven approach applied to a common software development process.Keywords -Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), Model-Driven Architecture (MDA), Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD), Software Engineering

Model-Driven Development of Human Tasks for Workflows

“…The development of a graphical user interface for instance in correlation with the abstract description of a human task, as given in the Human Task Diagram, has not been examined by this article. An approach to a model-driven development of graphical user interfaces can be found in [7]. To achieve a complete modeldriven development of human interaction in workflows, we will investigate a combination of both approaches as our next step.…”

“…A denial / confirmation email is send. The second activity "Check Registration" is a human task [7]. It has to be performed by a human person in the role "Staff Member".…”

“…To provide automatic transformations to source code of any desired platform is one of the main goals of MDA. Therewith, a high flexibility in software development, a shortened software development time and an increased software quality can be achieved [7].…”

Rapid GUI development on legacy systems

“…In this paper, we choose the everchanging and externally editable system state as the target for visualization, and show that the runtime models can be used as a bridge between such data and the visualized view. The work is related to the existing approaches to use modeling and meta-modeling technologies for the development of GUIs [5] and the visual language editors [3]. Instead of directly generate the whole GUI or editor code from the high-level specifications, we use runtime models as an explicit intermediate representation, separating the concerns between the system data and the graphical strategies.…”

Model-Driven Instrumentation of Graphical User Interfaces

“…UMLi allows for the modeling of certain GUI elements together with their behavior. Those elements are quite similar to the "GUI Profile" presented in [14]. However, the UMLi approach mainly focuses on the design phase of a software development process; regarding GUIs, it omits the artifacts which already could be acquired in earlier phases (e.g.…”