Smart composition of reusable software components in mobile application product lines

Abstract

Mobile application development opens up several challenges to developers. Among these challenges, possibly the most important one is the porting of applications to the heterogeneous devices available on the market. This requires mobile developers to create and maintain several versions of their applications in order to deal with particular features of each platform, including display size, development libraries, sensors, keypad layout, etc. The Software Product Lines (SPL) approach seems to be an useful technique to support mobile application development. A way to make SPL more effective is automating the software components composition for building mobile applications. We present a software infrastructure called AppSpotter that enables the dynamic and automated composition of software components of mobile applications taking into account the particular features of each mobile device. By means of the devices features, AppSpotter determines the components selection and composition of them to build customized mobile applications.