Generating a Language-Independent Graphical User Interfaces from UML Models

Amany Shatnawi1 and Raed Shatnawi2

1Department of Computer Science, Jordan University of science and Technology, Jordan,

2Department of Software Engineering, Jordan University of science and Technology, Jordan

Abstract: The cost of the software development is high and there is a need to automate parts or all activities of the software development to reduce the development costs. In this work, the User Interface (UI) design is automated and UIs are generated for language-independent code from Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. These diagrams are used to generate both the content of the UIs and the navigation through the use interfaces. Based on end-user feedback, the UML diagrams and the UI prototype can be iteratively refined. To demonstrate this work, a tool that automates the generation of UI prototype is built. The tool generates a prototype that is coded using an eXtensable Markup Language (XML) called the User Interface Markup Language (UIML). The proposed approach is validated and user interfaces are generated for two case studies.

Keywords: UI Prototyping, UIML, UML, language-independent UI.

Received September 20, 2013; accepted May 6, 2014