Multi-Device Context-Aware RIAs Using a Model-Driven Approach

Model-Driven Development concepts are exhibiting as a good engineering solution for the design of ubiquitous applications with multi-device user interfaces and other contextaware capacities. The Web has become an ideal platform for the deployment of such applications and therefore traditional Web development techniques are rapidly adopting Model- Driven principles to cope with the adaptation issues imposed by context-awareness and multichannel solutions. This discipline is being known as Model Driven Web Engineering. However, at the same time that the use of the Web and the number of people with mobile devices is growing, users are demanding more and better user experiences through the user interface. Web vendors answered introducing Rich Internet Applications that take advantage of the single-page paradigm and expand traditional Web features, providing richer content types, richer controls, richer temporal behaviors, richer interactivity and richer communications. While many recent devices support some type of RIA technology, RIAs extended features are showing some limitations of Model Driven Web Engineering methodologies to cope with multi-device context-awareness at the presentation level. This paper presents the combination of two different methodologies, WebML and RUX-Method, both using MDD principles, to obtain multi-device context-aware Rich Internet Applications using a Model-Driven approach. While WebML provides context-awareness at the data and business logic levels, RUX-Method deals with the presentation issues introduced by Rich Internet Applications.