A Comparative Analysis of Transformation En- gines for User Interface Development

Abstract. In software engineering, transformational development aims at devel-oping software systems by transforming a coarse-grained specification to final code through a sequence of small transformation steps. This transformational de-velopment method has followed a long tradition of establishing models and main-taining mappings between them so as to create and maintain accurate specifica-tions of a user interface. Although several transformation engines support these mappings, one of the major difficulties lies in the accurate selection of a transfor-mation engine capable of support a transformational approach for ensuring model-driven engineering of user interfaces. This paper provides a comparative analysis of transformation engines ranging from publicly or commercially available en-gines 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. 1