DSL-driven generation of Graphical User Interfaces

Abstract

AbstractDomain-specific languages (DSLs) are becoming more and more popular. However, the number of DSLs is still small when comparing to the number of existing applications. The results of our previous research showed that it is possible to speed up the DSL development process by aiding the first development phases (design and implementation). More specifically it is possible to generate DSLs from existing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) of component-based applications. Now we want to use the generated DSLs and their models to generate new user interfaces or even whole new applications. To verify this claim, in this paper we use existing technologies which simplify the creation of web applications: iTasks. We also describe stereotypes of creating GUIs which we used to extract data from existing applications and to generate new applications. In the last part of this paper we limit the types of applications, which can be used for extraction based on our experiments with the prototype.