Towards a New Perspective of Building Tools for Context-Aware Mobile Applications

Technological growth has been exponential in relation to mobile devices (such as embedded sensors as GPS or accelerometer) that have allowed developing context-aware mobile applications for the market. This growth generates a new challenge about how to support the creation of this kind of application to adapt them to the current user’s demand. Nowadays, there are several approaches that could be used to create context-aware mobile applications, but these approaches are not designed to support variability in the kind of generated applications. The aim of this paper is to propose a building tool that allows generating a wide variety of context-aware mobile applications. Our tool has been designed from scratch considering a taxonomy of variability concepts which help to identify the potential variability points to obtain more flexible building approaches. The first version of our tool is presented which is based on UML tools like Eclipse, Sirius Obeo, and JBoss. Finally, a discussion of different aspects is detailed to help designers to have guidelines to select the appropriate development environment for the design of building tools for context-aware mobile applications.