A Comparative Analysis of Transformation Engines for User Interface Development

The Model Driven Architecture (and model driven engineering in general) is much based on model-to-model transformations, and there exist a lot of tools to create these. The graphical user interface designer has to choose one, but these tools are not all equal, or even decide tocreate a custom one that could better suit his needs. Existing tools can be very different with respect to their transformation approach (graph on programmatic syntax), implementation paradigm (declarative, imperative, or both), and many other points. Some are easier to use, while others allow the creation of more complex rules. Moreover, most of them have their own programming language.

So, following the needs of the interface designer, his skills in programming and others criteria, the choice of creation tool will change, and therefore, it is very important to know the differences between the known techniques, and to see which one is more adapted for each case.

What we will do is, focusing on graphical interfaces development, review some existing transformation engines, and create ourself a custom one, implemented in java. And we will make a comparative analysis of these transformation engines.