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.
Wiki, a New Way to Produce Accessible Documents
Adapting complex documents to make them accessible for print disabled persons is an iterative process which involves various skills and requires the intervention of several people. Collaborative approaches are well suited, especially those based on Wikis which are now widely used to edit contents on the Web. A Wiki offers useful features to overcome some of the difficulties encountered when using word-processors. MediaWiki is a popular Wiki software which can be extended to allow users to import, edit and export contents using XML DTBook, the format designed by the DAISY Consortium for structuring text in an accessible way.