Cross-platform Mobile Development Based on MDA Approach

Abstract

Nowadays, the mobile operating systems market (Android, IOS, Windows Phone …) continues to grow. It has become a real challenge for application vendors to provide versatile applications in this competitive market in a short time. The challenge is even greater if the application is planned for multiple platforms whose the operating systems uses different technologies, namely, IOS/Objective-C environment for the Phone and the IPad, Java SDK for Android, etc. This fragmentation makes mobile application development rather difficult and very expensive, hence the use of cross-platform development. To address the cross-platform development different approach exist, the choice was focused on the MDA approach whose principle is the elaboration of various UML models. By studying in detail various target platforms on the basis of a set of criteria and performing a model for each criterion, the aim of our research work is to elaborate a meta-model from UML models realized for each platform.