Publication Date
11-2017
Abstract
Model driven development (MDD) shifts the focus of software development from writing code to building models by developing an application as a series of transformations on models including eventual code generation. Can the key ideas of MDD be applied to the development of Android apps, one of the most popular mobile platforms of today? To answer this question, we perform a small case study of developing an Android app for playing Sudoku puzzles. We use the Object Constraint Language (OCL) as the notation for creating precise models and translate OCL constraints to Android Java code. Our findings are mixed in that there is a great opportunity for generating a significant amount of both platform-neutral and Android-specific code automatically but there is a potential concern on the memory efficiency of the generated code. We also point out several shortcomings of OCL in writing precise and complete specifications for UML models and suggest a few extensions and improvements to make it more expressive and suitable for MDD. The reader is assumed to be familiar with OCL.
Comments
Technical Report: UTEP-CS-17-91