A Comparative Analysis of Tranformation Engines for User Interface Development

In software engineering, transformational development aims at developing software systems by transforming a coarse-grained specification to final code through a sequence of small transformation steps. This transformational development method has followed a long tradition of establishing models and maintaining mappings between them so as to create and maintain accurate specifications of a user interface. User Interface mappings are also relevant to web engineering. We have been working not just User Interface mappings for webbased systems but as well for Information Systems in general. However, we have been confronted to the mapping problem as the use of an appropriate transformation tool it still an issue in our research group. Although several transformation engines support mappings a transformation engine capable of supporting a transformational approach for ensuring model-driven engineering of user interfaces is still an open issue. This paper provides a comparative analysis of transformation engines ranging from publicly or commercially available engines to be adapted to the mapping problem to hand-coded transformation engines that we developed for the sole purpose of supporting the mapping problem. The results of the comparison let authors to identify the type of transformation engine that fits better to their skills, needs and preferences.