Towards agile cross-platform application development with Smalltalk and Model Driven Engineering

Abstract : Nowadays, general public applications or specific infor-mation systems must be able to run on mobile platforms as well as on conventional platforms. Because developers have to deal with mobile platform specificities, this constraint si-gnificantly lessen the benefits of agile methods and as a consequence impacts on the application development cost. Many research works aim at reducing the development cost. Prototyping as well as automatic code generation have been investigated by the community. In this article, we present Dali, a framework that uses both Smalltalk and Model Dri-ven Engineering. With Dali, an application model can be de-signed for multiple platforms and interpreted before code generation. An execution platform is modelled as a set of constraints over a context. These constraints can affect the presentation of the Graphical User-Interface (GUI) but also the overall behaviour of an application.