Easing the Creation Process of Mobile Applications for Non-Technical Users

In this day and age, the mobile phone is becoming one of the most
indispensable personal computing device. People no longer use it
just for communication (i.e. calling, sending messages) but also
for other aspects of their lives as well. Because of this rise in
demand for different and innovative applications, mobile companies
(i.e. mobile handset manufacturers and mobile network providers)
and organizations have realized the power of collaborative software
development and have changed their business strategy. Instead of
hiring specific organizations to do programming, they are now
opening up their APIs and tools to allow ordinary people create
their own mobile applications either for personal use or for
profit. However, the problem with this approach is that there are
people who might have nice ideas of their own but do not possess
the technical expertise in order to create applications
implementing these ideas. The goal of this research is to find ways
to simplify the creation of mobile applications for non-technical
people by applying model-driven software development particularly
domain-specific modeling combined with techniques from the field of
human-computer interaction (HCI) particularly iterative,
user-centered system design. As proof of concept, we concentrate on
the development of applications in the domain of mHealth and use
the Android Framework as the target platform for code generation.
The iterative user-centered design and development of the front-end
tool which is called the Mobia Modeler, led us to eventually create
a tool that features a configurable-component based design and
integrated modeless environment to simplify the different
development tasks of end-users. The Mobia models feature both
constructs specialized for specific domains (e.g. sensor component,
special component ), and also those that are applicable to any type
of domain (e.g. structure component, basic component ). In order to
accommodate different needs of end-users, a clear separation
between the front-end tools (i.e. Mobia Modeler ) and the
underlying code generator (i.e. Mobia Processor ) is recommended as
long as there is a consistent model in between, that serves as a
bridge between the different tools.