Reducing implementation time for the GUI design-to-code process using DSL

To implement a GUI, a software engineer needs more information than a designer‘s original design document offers. Therefore, designers create supporting documentation such as wireframes, explicit specifications and interactive prototypes in order to better convey their intention. Software engineers then need to interpret these design deliverables in order to correctly implement the GUI. While this GUI design-to-code process works, it consumes considerable amounts of time and potentially results in a loss of accuracy with respect to the original design. Here we propose an automated workflow, where the original design is first converted to code through an intermediary language called DSL. This language supports a broad range of GUIs, and forms the basis for automated translation to working code. Combining existing research and our own analysis of a set of GUIs we have derived the requirements for DSL to be able to describe most GUIs and thereby sufficiently support our proposed GUI design-to-code workflow. With the requirements of DSL specified, this paper is a first step in the realisation of our goal to reduce the implementation time for GUIs while at the same time increasing the accuracy of the end result.