A model driven framework for modeling and composing service based Android applications

Abstract

Service based applications, i.e. applications that delegate work to remote web services, have emerged as a key architecture for mobile applications. Such applications can be created by composing access to web services. However, the process is still largely manual in today's practice. This paper presents a new model driven framework called DroidCompo that aims to provide an authoring environment for composing service based applications for the Android platform. DroidCompo provides: a. models that allow users to describe Android applications, web services and web service clients; b. an abstraction called Form Layout which is used to derive a user interface from the result structure of web services; and c. a Composition model that supports integration of both logic and user interface. Defining applications using DroidCompo alleviates the need for manual programming, while the composition approach enables and promotes reuse at the model instance and shared library levels.