Model-Driven Software Development on Android Phones

Heiko Behrens, Itemis

Most Android applications are to some extend connected to existing data sources such as web resources or REST APIs. Even though existing libraries simplify developer's life for retrieving, showing or navigating data structures, a fairly large amount of tedious and error-prone work remains.
Why not use a generator for your next project that implements this for you? The Eclipse Modeling Project with components such as Xtext and Xpand offers sophisticated tools to build domain-specific languages able to describe and generate large parts of these data-driven applications.

In this session I will demonstrate how tightly such a model-driven solution based on a "mobile DSL" can be integrated into Android's existing tool chain. From scratch, I will use this DSL to develop and enhance an Android app that connects to a weblog and a Google spreadsheet to browse the DroidCon's conference program. The tooling I will present links to Java classes, statically validates semantic constraints one cannot express in Java at all and allows you to weave in manually written code - and all this within just 20 minutes!