WL++: Code Generation of Multi-platform Mobile Clients to Restful Back-Ends

Abstract

With the proliferation of mobile devices and the adoption of mobile applications in most daily-life activities, it is necessary for mobile-application construction to become more efficient and systematic and less costly. In this paper, we describe a code-generation environment, namely WL++, for mobile applications accessing Restful back-ends. Our framework (a) extracts the data models of the to-be-generated application from the back-end APIs or from existing resource schemas, (b) enables developers to extend the application model and annotate it with information regarding the application's user-interaction behavior through a graphical editor, and (c) transforms it into a mobile application, through a template-refinement process, that can be deployed on a variety of platforms.