IFVM bridge: A model driven IFML execution

Abstract

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) present a powerful part of software systems that allows a simplified assimilation and manipulation by users throw visual objects such as text, image and button. however, with the increasing complexity of GUIs and the diversity of their interaction mode required by users to access information anywhere and anytime, the need for designing efficient and more adaptive user interfaces has become a necessity. Therefore, UIs researchers have attempted to address these issues by designing user interfaces at a high level of abstraction to separate GUI's specification from its implementation. Besides, the OMG (Object Management Group) adopted the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML) [1] as a standard in March 2013 for this purpose. In this paper, we present a new model driven development approach to efficiently execute the abstract representation of software's front-end with focus on navigation between the views. We introduce a IFML virtual machine IFVM which executes user interfaces by passing from IFML models to be translated into an intermediate bytecode representation proposed as the instruction set of IFVM virtual machine.