Tool support for mobile application development can significantly improve programmer productivity and software quality. Pegboard is a novel tooling framework that extends the Eclipse integrated development environment to support the development of mobile distributed applications. Its extensible design supports multiple application models and the orchestration of external tooling components throughout the development cycle. In this paper we describe Pegboard's architecture and implementation, and show how it improves the development experience through organization, visualization, simplification and guidance. We also discuss insights gained from interviewing software developers, including early users of Pegboard.

The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model, which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets, including, for example, different client devices.