Cross-Platform Mobile Development with DSLs

Developing great apps for mobile platforms like Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 or the mobile web is a challenging task: you have to cope with limited resources, small screens and spotty connectivity. Designing a great app for one platform is challenging enough, delivering cross-platform apps even more so! A number of different approaches have been thought out, most of them using web technologies as an abstraction layer.

In this session, we will take a quick glance at the various approaches to build cross-platform mobile apps. In particular, we will take a closer look at using model-driven technologies to design apps that run on iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the mobile web. After highlighting important conceptual design considerations we will demonstrate a DSL we developed (of course using Xtext) live in action. Be prepared for an entertaining demo and be sure to bring your own phone, as it might help you to win a prize! After the demo, we will dive into the implementation of the mobile DSL and highlight some interesting aspects like the design of the DSL and the code generator.