Model-Driven Engineering of Behaviors for User Interfaces in Multiple Contexts of Use

This paper describes a model-driven engineering approach for specifying, designing, and generating consistent behaviors in graphical user interfaces in multiple contexts of use, i.e. different users using different computing platforms in different physical environments. This methodological approach is structured according to the levels of abstraction of the Cameleon Reference Framework: task and domain, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, and final user interface. A behavior model captures the abstractions of the behavior in terms of abstract events and abstract behavior primitives in the same way a traditional presentation model may capture the abstraction of the visual components of a user interface. The behavior modeled at the abstract level is reified into a concrete user interface by model-to-model transformation. The concrete user interface leads to the final user interface running thanks to code by model-to-code generation.