Parlira - An Interactive Phrasebook for Android Devices

Abstract

This bachelor thesis documents the development of Parlira. Parlira is an offline phrasebook application for Android devices with a foundation built on the functional programming language the Grammatical Framework(GF). The goal of the project was to develop an application where the user can alter different phrases to fit specific situations. The main problems were to create an intuitive user interface with dynamic updating of the translations, as well as making the application configurable. During the project, several commonly used practices in user interface design and software development were used and reviewed for example Scrum and user stories. They were used in order to ensure the fulfillment of the requirements and the smooth development of the application. The project has resulted in an application that supports dynamic updating by representing the abstract syntaxes of GF with a tree structure in Java. As a result of this, a user can choose a phrase and alter different parts of it according to his or her needs. All configurations of the available phrases are stored in an extensible XML file. This means that new phrases can be added by just changing the configuration file without altering the code of the application.