Platform-variant applications from platform-independent models via templates

Abstract

By raising the level of abstraction from code to models, model-driven development (MDD) emphasises design rather than implementation and platform-specificity. This paper presents an experiment with a MDD approach, which takes platform-independent models and generates code for various platforms from them. The platform code is generated from templates. Our approach is based on EP, a formal executable modelling language, supplemented with OCL, and FTL, a formal language of templates. The paper's experiment generates code for the mobile platforms Android and iPhone from the same abstract functional model of a case study. The experiment shows the feasibility of MDD to tackle present day problems, highlighting many benefits of the MDD approach and opportunities for improvement. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.