A Metamodel-Based Approach for Automatic User Interface Generation

One of the advantages of following a MDA-based approach in the development of interactive applications is the possibility of generating multiple platform-specific user interfaces (UI) from the same platform independent UI model. However, the effort required to create the UI model may be significant. In the case of data-intensive applications, a large part of the UI structure and functionality is closely related with the structure and functionality of the domain entities described in the domain model, and the access rules specified in the use case model. This paper presents an approach to reduce the effort required to create platform independent UI models for data intensive applications, by automatically generating an initial UI model from domain and use case models. For that purpose, UML-aligned metamodels for domain and use case models are defined, together with a MOF-based metamodel for user interface models. The transformation rules that drive the UI model generation are introduced. It is also proposed a MDA-based process for the development of data intensive interactive applications based on the proposed model architecture and transformations.