XIS-mobile: a DSL for mobile applications

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly more present in our daily life, allowing people to perform several tasks through the use of smartphones or tablets. Despite fostering the innovation, the rapid growth of the mobile market resulted in some fragmentation of the mobile platforms. The existence of different mobile operating systems with different programming languages and tools can be a problem when someone wants to release an application in multiple platforms. Rewriting the application for each platform is usually impracticable either in terms of budget or time, requiring a great effort. Therefore, a solution that could generate cross-platform applications without compromising the quality, would decrease the time to market and increase the number of potential users. This paper presents the XIS-Mobile language, defined as a UML profile in the context of the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, and discusses its main challenges and benefits in the context of the cross-platform mobile application development.