Using Profiles to Support Model Transformations in the Model-Driven Development of User Interfaces

The model-driven User Interface (UI) development life cycle usually evolves from high-level models, which represent abstract UI concepts, to concrete models, which are more related to the UI implementation details, until the final UI is generated. This process is based on a set of model-to-model and model-to-code transformations. Several industrial tools have applied this approach in order to generate the UI. However, these model transformations are mainly fixed and are not always the best solution for a specific UI. In this work, the notion of Transformation Profile is introduced to better specify the model-to-model transformations. A Transformation Profile is made up of a set of predefined Model Mappings and a Transformation Template. The mappings connect initial and target UI models in a flexible way, whereas the Transformation Template gathers high-level parameters to apply to the transformation. As a consequence, a Transformation Profile enables designers to define parameterized transformations that could be reused for another UI development project.