Starting October 2013, my research group at Politecnico di Milano and WebRatio have started a research project called Automobile, which aims at designing and bringing to the market innovative methodologies, software tools, and vertical applications for the cost-effective implementation of cross-platform, multi-device mobile applications, i.e. business applications that can be accessed by users on a variety of devices and operating systems, including PC, cellular / smart phones and tablets.
AutoMobile will exploit the paradigm of Model-Driven Engineering and code generation to dramatically simplify multi-device development, reducing substantially cost and development times. AutoMobile will rely on modeling languages such as IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Languages) and on tools like WebRatio.
The other partners of the project are the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, Forward Software, and Moonsubmarine.
The official project Web site is: http://automobile.webratio.com.
The project is now entering the core part of the work: we have studied the background and related work, and we have defined the business requirements. We are now starting studying the domain-specific extension of IFML for mobile, based on the study of the capabilities of the different mobile platforms and devices, including cross-platform approaches like PhoneGap.
We look forward to sharing with you our results!
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