Arcabouço baseado em componentes para o desenvolvimento de interface de usuário de aplicação para smart TV.

Abstract

The concept of SmarTV allows users to install applications on TVs. Nowadays, some TV brands provide their own toolkits so that developers can create their own applications and publish in the brand store. Ginga middleware was developed in Brazil to be used in Brazilian Digital TV Standard, making possible the development of applications with interaction between users and TV. Ginga recommends developers to use the programming language Lua to develop applications, along with the Nested Context Language. The middleware specifies a library in Lua with modules which allow to draw on the screen and to manage TV and remote control events. However, the native library provided by Ginga is primitive for user interface development to SmartTV and Digital TV applications. Consequently, this task becames unproductive due to challenges of handling events, writing very large codes and avoiding code replication. Furthermore, the programmers must deal with memory management and efficiency of the applications. In this work, we propose a framework for applications development with user interface to improve the productivity of developers in this task. The framework is based on interface components, which decreases the necessary effort to create an element and facilitates reusing. As result, the library LuaSmartGUI was developed in Lua. Seven components present in our solution were evaluated. Then, another evaluation was made with volunteers developers using the both approaches: our solution and the native Ginga library. Our results suggest that, despite the increase of approximately 867% in memory usage, LuaSmartGUI proved to be approximately 61% more efficient and showed a gain of about 31% in productivity. The experiments showed that the productivity and efficiency goals have been met, but it’s necessary to improve the memory management for the libraryusetobecome viable.