TRANSFORMATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF USER INTERFACES WITH GRAPH TRANSFORMATIONS

摘要

In software engineering transformational development aims at developing software systems by transforming a coarse-grained specification to final code (or to a detailed specification) through a sequence of small transformation steps. Transformational development is known to bring benefits such as: correctness-preserving of the development cycle, explicit mappings between development steps, reusability and reversibility of transformations. No piece of literature provides a systematic formal system applying transformational development to user interface engineering. To fill this gap, a methodology, called TOMATO, is described in three facets: 1) A development cycle is defined to outline possible transformations. 2) A language for supporting the methodology is presented relying on graph transformations, a mathematical system for expressing specifications and transformation rules. 3) A tool implementation, using a visual syntax, is illustrated.