Towards a Reference Architecture for Model-Driven Business Apps

Model-driven development techniques have been proposed for cross-platform app development. Typically, an individual domain-specific language (DSL) is used. The MD
²
framework consists of a DSL for business apps and generators, which transform a domain model to native platform code. Prior research on it focused on language and general generator design, this paper accentuates the code generation stage. A reference architecture for the generated apps is proposed to accelerate the development of new generators for which architectural decisions had been made on ad-hoc basis up to now. Moreover, generators are going to expose similar structures that facilitate maintenance. Our proposal takes MD
²
's characteristics into account while providing developers with greater flexibility. A code generator for a commercial cross-platform framework has been realized, demonstrating the applicability of our proposal. We not only present steps towards a reference architecture but generalize findings for use beyond the area of mobile computing.