Research on User Interface Transformation Method Based on MDA

The user interface development method based on model driven architecture can effectively solve the problem that different platform-specific user interfaces have to be developed for the same application when the application needs to run on different platforms. This method firstly designs the platform-independent model (PIM) of the user interface, then transforms the PIM into a variety of mainstream platform-specific model (PSM) automatically or semi-automatically, and finally transforms the PSM to a platform specific code. The user interface transformation method from PIM to PSM is presented in this paper. Firstly, a user interface PSM meta-model is defined. Secondly, the mapping rules of PIM elements to PSM elements are defined in the meta-model level, and the transformation algorithm from PIM to PSM is designed. To verify the effectiveness of the method, we implemented a user interface software development tool which supports the transformation from PIM to PSM based on EMF and GMF.