Multi-Platform Design of Smartphone Applications

Smartphone application developers should support all the main leading platforms which share the market thus increasing time-to-market and development cost. To solve this problem, the work proposes a design flow based on Model-Driven Design to develop a single version of the smartphone application which can be automatically translated into the main platform-dependent versions. We introduce a UML2 profile to represent the elements of the smartphone application independently of the target platform; the behavior of the application is modeled as a finite-state machine while the graphical user interface is modeled by using classes and objects. A set of translation rules are defined to obtain a platform-depended representation and then the actual code. The methodology has been validated by generating an application for the Android and Windows Phone platforms and by comparing it to the versions written in the traditional way.