Towards a Platform Independent Graphical User Interface

摘要

In classical software development processes, graphical user interfaces cannot be reused across development platforms. In addition, in MDA-based processes, they are integrated only after making the transformation of the PIM to the PSM since they belong to the target platform and hence have the same problem. They are considered part of the PSM, which deprives us from reusing them as we do for the business logic. In this paper, we aim at proposing a common platform independent graphical user interface library that represents the presentation logic in terms of inputs and outputs. This is achievable through proposing a generic metamodel for basic GUI controls that focus on getting and presenting data rather than those of ergonomic purposes. This metamodel will enable us to build generic graphical interfaces that can be transformed to any of the market libraries such as AWT, SWING, WinForms, Tkinter. That is why we built metamodels for those libraries and defined mappings between the generic metamodel and those libraries metamodels. Finally, the generic GUI library is used to make PIM-GUIs that are kept with business-PIMs and that can together be reused in a way that is independent from any development platform. Final mappings transforms these PIM-GUIs into platform bound GUIs or PSM-GUIs such those we mentioned earlier or any future graphical library.