Bridging Design and Development with Automated Declarative UI Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhou, Ting, Zhao, Yanjie, Hou, Xinyi, Sun, Xiaoyu, Chen, Kai, Wang, Haoyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Zhou, Ting
Zhao, Yanjie
Hou, Xinyi
Sun, Xiaoyu
Chen, Kai
Wang, Haoyu
author_facet Zhou, Ting
Zhao, Yanjie
Hou, Xinyi
Sun, Xiaoyu
Chen, Kai
Wang, Haoyu
contents Declarative UI frameworks have gained widespread adoption in mobile app development, offering benefits such as improved code readability and easier maintenance. Despite these advantages, the process of translating UI designs into functional code remains challenging and time-consuming. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in directly generating mobile app code from user interface (UI) designs. However, the direct application of MLLMs to this task is limited by challenges in accurately recognizing UI components and comprehensively capturing interaction logic. To address these challenges, we propose DeclarUI, an automated approach that synergizes computer vision (CV), MLLMs, and iterative compiler-driven optimization to generate and refine declarative UI code from designs. DeclarUI enhances visual fidelity, functional completeness, and code quality through precise component segmentation, Page Transition Graphs (PTGs) for modeling complex inter-page relationships, and iterative optimization. In our evaluation, DeclarUI outperforms baselines on React Native, a widely adopted declarative UI framework, achieving a 96.8% PTG coverage rate and a 98% compilation success rate. Notably, DeclarUI demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art MLLMs, with a 123% increase in PTG coverage rate, up to 55% enhancement in visual similarity scores, and a 29% boost in compilation success rate. We further demonstrate DeclarUI's generalizability through successful applications to Flutter and ArkUI frameworks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11667
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging Design and Development with Automated Declarative UI Code Generation
Zhou, Ting
Zhao, Yanjie
Hou, Xinyi
Sun, Xiaoyu
Chen, Kai
Wang, Haoyu
Software Engineering
Declarative UI frameworks have gained widespread adoption in mobile app development, offering benefits such as improved code readability and easier maintenance. Despite these advantages, the process of translating UI designs into functional code remains challenging and time-consuming. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promise in directly generating mobile app code from user interface (UI) designs. However, the direct application of MLLMs to this task is limited by challenges in accurately recognizing UI components and comprehensively capturing interaction logic. To address these challenges, we propose DeclarUI, an automated approach that synergizes computer vision (CV), MLLMs, and iterative compiler-driven optimization to generate and refine declarative UI code from designs. DeclarUI enhances visual fidelity, functional completeness, and code quality through precise component segmentation, Page Transition Graphs (PTGs) for modeling complex inter-page relationships, and iterative optimization. In our evaluation, DeclarUI outperforms baselines on React Native, a widely adopted declarative UI framework, achieving a 96.8% PTG coverage rate and a 98% compilation success rate. Notably, DeclarUI demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art MLLMs, with a 123% increase in PTG coverage rate, up to 55% enhancement in visual similarity scores, and a 29% boost in compilation success rate. We further demonstrate DeclarUI's generalizability through successful applications to Flutter and ArkUI frameworks.
title Bridging Design and Development with Automated Declarative UI Code Generation
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11667