Model Driven Context Aware Reactive Applications

The explosion of smartphones and tablets has created a demand for fairly simple applications that are essentially driven by user events and that have some element of context-awareness. Unfortunately, the complexity of  technology used to develop such applications is not commensurate with the complexity of the resulting app. Therefore, this is an area that is ripe for Model Driven Engineering. There are currently a number of ongoing attempts at developing modelling languages and code generation in this domain, however many are complex, platform specific and/or incomplete. I am currently working on an approach that uses UML-style class and state diagrams to capture the structure and big-picture behaviour of such applications and uses a typed functional calculus equipped with essential context-aware reactive features to fill in the detail. The rest of this post describes the models, I'll post the calculus next time.

The diagram on the left shows Tony's mobile phone.
Clicking on 'add' allows the current address book to be viewed and edited as shown on the right

The owner is altered when a phone that occurs in the address book comes into range.

There are several general features that occur in the application: hierarchical GUI; user-events; context-events; state-changes. These can be captured on stereotyped UML class diagrams and state machines.

 The model on the left shows the main screen. there is a single root class called Main. Classes labelled external are part of a user-defined library that must conform to a given interface and that raise events. Classes labelled widget are user defined and can handle (via handler), raise events (via event) and perform commands (via command). Events are processed according to a containment hierarchy. The main screen is shown in the screen-shot above.

The model on the right shows the screen that is created when the 'add' button is pressed. The add screen is shown in the screen-shot above. It uses external widgets to handle the display and editing of lists of contacts. Notics the link back to the main screen that can be used when the back button is pressed. The delete screen is the same as the add screen.

The model on the left shows the screen that is created when the owner is notified of a contact that has come into range.

The behaviour is specified using a state machine where the states correspond to the root classes of the other models. The actions on the transitions are commands and transitions are fired in response to events (user or context).