The price drop of digital displays during the last decade has promoted the use of coupled-display ecosystems. This paper proposes a model-based approach to develop applications that exploit these ecosystems. It introduces the concept of Distributable User Interface to define applications running on coupled-display ecosystems that enable users to distribute interaction objects (e.g., labels, buttons, panels and frames) across interaction surfaces (e.g., Web documents, frames and panels) using a set of distribution primitives. The Distributable User Interface concept is formalized in the User Interface Distribution meta-model, which is implemented using the Eclipse Modeling Framework to ensure the compliance of these models with the OMG standards. This paper also describes the graphical model editor to create, edit and validate User Interface Distribution models conforming to the proposed meta-model. The models created with the model editor are used as input parameters for the model-to-text transformation developed in Acceleo that generates the source code of Web applications supporting Distributable User Interfaces. The generated code runs on the User Interface Distribution Framework which is also presented in this paper. Finally, the On-line Photo Gallery application is the case of study presented to demonstrate the viability of the proposal.
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