Evaluation of descriptive user interface methodologies for mobile devices

Abstract

The difficulty application developers in the mobile phone environment are facing is the variety of devices on the market. Since there are a few relevant global players with different operating systems and devices, it is getting more expensive to adapt applications once implemented from one hardware platform to another. To keep the costs at a minimum, a structured and reusable software architecture is crucial. Especially the maintenance of the user interface (UI) is a big challenge, thus it is beneficial to have a platform independent description of it. This paper aims at the upper layers of the software which are responsible for the user interface. A few established user interface declaration technologies and an own approach will be investigated. It is shown, that it could be beneficial when the logic-which is responsible for screen changes-is contained in the user interface description. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.