A Model Driven Approach for State Management in Mobile Applications
With the paradigm shift from desktop to mobile applications and the growing demand for mobile devices has awakened the interest of the IT industry on how to tackle the development of mobile applications. Managing application state is hard in building modern mobile applications. As application complexity increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the track of changing state and mapping those changes back to user interface. State management is challenging due to its low-level implementation complexity. To overcome above mentioned issue, there is a strong need to introduce model driven approach for state management in mobile applications. This paper proposes a Unified Modeling Language profile for Mobile Application State Management (UMASM) to simplify mobile application state management requirements. Particularly, UMASM is capable of representing mobile state management requirements at higher abstraction level. This provides the strong basis to automatically generate low level implementations in target platform like Redux from high level UMASM models. The applicability of UMASM is validated through e-banking application case study.
A Model-Driven Framework for Android Supporting Cross-Platform GUI Development
The rapid growth of users makes android application development one of the most focused areas in the software industry. Among others, the screen size is a considerable problem in developing mobile graphical user interfaces. Quite a work has been done in the field to solve this issue programmatically. However, truncated reusability and insufficient portability along with other challenges are posed, which results in multiple designs of an application that need to be maintained equally as major applications. This article introduces a novel model-driven framework that serves the purpose of a prompt development of responsive User Interfaces (UI) for various screen sizes. Particularly a Meta Model is proposed. As tool support, a Sirius graphical modeling tool has also been developed. Furthermore, Model to Text Transformation code has been written using Acceleo language to transform the modeled UI scenario into an executable Java and XML code. The framework allows modeling of UI scenarios using our graphical modeling tool and generates executable platform-specific code (Java & XML) resulting in prompt development of a complex application with simplicity. The applicability of the proposed framework has been demonstrated by developing a mobile application as a case study.
Experience of using rating scales for the assessment of vocational trainees in general practice.
For two years trainers in the northern half of the south western region have been asked to assess their trainees with a condensed version of the new Manchester rating scales for vocational training in general practice and to send copies to the regional adviser. The condensed version retains the 23 scales but does not include the subscales. Trainers' workshops and comments from individuals suggested that no radical improvements to the scales were required and that they were an adequate statement of what was required from trainees. The response rate of 89% for returning at least one assessment and 38% for returning all three suggested that use of this condensed version would be more feasible than using the full version of the scales. Analysis of 86 first assessments and 48 sets of three assessments showed a range of variation both in trainee ratings and use of individual scales that was consistent with expectations. A lack of significant rank correlations between the scales indicated that each of the scales measured a different characteristic of behaviour. We suggest that the most useful way to achieve systematic assessment of vocational trainees is by the use of the 23 main rating scales, with regional variations where appropriate.