Integrating Authoring Tools into Model-Driven Development of Interactive Multimedia Applications

The Multimedia Modeling Language (MML) is a platformindependent modeling language for model-driven development of interactive multimedia applications. Using models provides several advantages like well-structured applications and better coordination of the different developer groups involved in the development process. However, the creative tasks – like graphical design of the user interface and the design of media objects – are better supported by traditional informal methods and tools. In particular multimedia authoring tools such as Adobe Flash are well established for multimedia application development. In this paper we show how MML and authoring tools can be integrated by the example of Flash. Therefore we transform the MML models into code skeletons which can be directly loaded into the Flash authoring tool to perform the creative design tasks and finalize the application. In that way, the strengths of models and authoring tools are combined. The paper shows the required level of abstraction for the models, introduces a metamodel and a suitable code structure for the Flash platform, and finally presents the transformation.