Reversing GUIs to XIML Descriptions for the Adaptation to Heterogeneous Devices

The spread of Personal Wireless Devices (PWDs) has raised the need to migrate existing applications to these new environments. Desktop applications often exhibit complex user interfaces and are too large and resource demanding to be executed on devices with limited resources without changing the application code. Current research efforts are mainly focused on Web applications whose user interfaces are specifically designed for multi-platform environments through platform-independent models. On the contrary, little effort has been made to support the migration of applications with component-based GUIs towards PWD environments. This paper presents a tool for reverse engineering Java GUIs through their transformations to XIML-based abstract descriptions. The resulting descriptions are used by the TCPTE framework to be rendered into different GUIs, which are dynamically adapted to heterogeneous devices on the basis of their profile communicated at request time.