Evaluation of XIS-Mobile, a Domain Specific Language for Mobile Application Development

Abstract

The great evolution of the mobile market during the last years caused some fragmentation of the mobile platforms namely through the existence of different programming languages and software development tools for each platform. This fact can be an obstacle and increases the development complexity and costs when we want to develop mobile applications for multiple platforms. The XIS-Mobile domain specific language (defined as a UML profile) and its MDD-based framework address this problem by proposing platform-independent models to describe mobile applications and from them automatically generate the application’s source code. Many issues arose during an iterative process of evaluation which originated changes and the evolution of XIS-Mobile. This paper presents the results of the evaluation of XIS-Mobile (both the language and the companion framework) obtained through the implementation of a case study and by conducting a user session, and discusses its benefits and challenges.