An Empirical Evaluation of AXIOM as an Approach to Cross-platform Mobile Application Development

AXIOM is a domain-specific modeling language for cross-platform mobile applications. AXIOM is based on more general techniques such as Model-Driven Architecture and generates native code for the iOS and Android platforms. Previous small-scale quantitative experiments suggested that AXIOM had the potential to provide significant productivity benefits. We have since conducted a limited set of more complex, mid-scale experiments and analyzed AXIOM's capabilities using both quantitative and qualitative metrics to further define AXIOM's ability to improve developer productivity when building cross-platform mobile applications. In this paper we describe the methodology of our mid-scale experiments and present the findings from source code and SonarQube analyses. We evaluate these findings and discuss what they mean to AXIOM in general. Finally, we look at possible changes to AXIOM's syntax and capabilities.