Using document-oriented GUIs in dynamic software product lines

Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) Engineering has gained interest through its promise of being able to unify software adaptation whereby software adaptation can be realised at compile time and runtime. While previous work has enabled program logic adaptation by the use of language extensions and platform support, little attention has been placed on Graphical User Interface (GUI) variability. Different design patterns including the Model View Controller are commonly used in GUI implementation, with GUI documents being used for declaring the GUI. To handle dynamic GUI variability currently, the developer needs to implement GUI refinements using multiple techniques. This paper proposes a solution for dealing with GUI document variability, statically and dynamically, in a unified way. In our approach, we currently use a compile time method for producing GUI variants, and code transformations to handle these variants within the application at runtime. To avoid GUI duplicates, only GUI variants that are unique, and related to a valid product configuration, are produced. To validate our approach, we implemented tool support to enable this for Android based applications.