User interface design for responsive web applications

Abstract

The design of web applications that adapt to different kinds of devices is now a necessity. The responsive web design (RWD) is an actual approach to this problem. There exists a large quantity of responsive frameworks (RF) for developing RWDs. In particular for the domain of Rich internet applications and for the adaptation of applications to different kinds of devices we have found a few adaptive design approaches that start with abstract user interface (UI) models; however, such approaches did not take into account the use of RFs. The problem of defining a development process from an abstract UI model to a RF is interesting due to some reasons; a good process should consider: an abstract UI model whose elements are abstractions for RF widgets, the use of tools for RFs that generate part of the final UI code, the use of model transformations to map abstract UI elements onto widgets of the RF. In this paper we created an abstract UI model called RIAAD2 that considers abstractions for all the UI elements of a selected set of RFs, and we developed a process for the creation of a final UI using a RF that considers the above requirements.