An Architectural Style for Ajax

A new breed of web application, dubbed AJAX, is emerging in response to a limited degree of interactivity in large-grain stateless Web interactions. At the heart of this new approach lies a single page interaction model that facilitates rich interactivity. We have studied and experimented with several AJAX frameworks trying to understand their architectural properties. In this paper, we summarize three of these frameworks and examine their properties and introduce the SPIAR architectural style. We describe the guiding software engineering principles and the constraints chosen to induce the desired properties. The style emphasizes user interface component development, and intermediary delta-communication between client/server components, to improve user interactivity and ease of development. In addition, we use the concepts and principles to discuss various open issues in AJAX frameworks and application development.Comment: 2nd revision: references ordered, images resized, typo

Global Diffusion of the Internet XV: Web 2.0 Technologies, Principles, and Applications: A Conceptual Framework from Technology Push and Demand Pull Perspective

Web 2.0, the current Internet evolution, can be described by several key features of an expanded Web that is more interactive; allows easy social interactions through participation and collaboration from a variety of human sectors; responds more immediately to users\u27 queries and needs; is easier to search; and provides a faster, smoother, realistic and engaging user search capability, often with automatic updates to users. The purpose of this study is three-fold. First, the primary goal is to propose a conceptual Web 2.0 framework that provides better understanding of the Web 2.0 concept by classifying current key components in a holistic manner. Second, using several selective key components from the conceptual framework, this study conducts case analyses of Web 2.0 applications to discuss how they have adopted the selective key features (i.e., participation, collaboration, rich user experience, social networking, semantics, and interactivity responsiveness) of the conceptual Web 2.0 framework. Finally, the study provides insightful discussion of some challenges and opportunities provided by Web 2.0 to education, business, and social life

Exploiting Personal Web Servers for Mobile Context-Aware Applications

There is an increasing trend in moving desktop applications to web browsers, even when the web server is running on the same desktop machine. In this paper we go further in this direction and show how to combine a web server, a web application framework (enhanced to support desktop-like Model-View-Controller interaction) and a context-aware architecture to develop web based mobile context-aware applications. By using this approach we take advantage of the well established web paradigm to design the GUIs and the inherent ability of the web to mash up applications with external components (such as Google Maps). On top of that, since the web server runs on the device itself, the application can access local resources (such as disk space or sensing devices, which are indispensable for context-aware systems) avoiding the sandbox model of the web browsers. To illustrate our approach we show how a mobile hypermedia system has been built on top of our platform.Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada (LIFIA

N-Screen Application Framework

Smartphones and tablets with advanced computing ability and connectivity have already become indispensable in our daily lives. As operating systems of these computer-like handheld devices are getting more mature and stable, many users want physically separated devices to interact with one another and with shared resources in real time. Those devices may have the same type of operating systems, such as sharing between android smartphone and tablets. However, sometimes the sharing occurs among different operating systems. A user may want to use a smartphone to control the menu while the image presentation is displaying on the Internet Protocol television (IPTV), as well as the audio on a personal computer. This scenario brings about the motivation of this thesis. This thesis proposes an architecture that allows for sharing resources among many devices with separated screens at real-time. Compared with traditional mobile application framework, instead of the user experience on a specific device, the consistent user experience across multiple devices becomes the key concern. This research introduces a novel approach to implement the classical Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework in a distributed manner with a multi-layered distributed controller. To ensure consistent user experiences across multiple devices with di erent platforms, this research also adopts a channel-based Publish/Subscribe with effective server push state synchronization. The experiments evaluate the portability, message travelling latency improvement and bandwidth optimization. The results of those experiments prove the advantages of the n-Screen Application Framework (NSAF) both in portability that allows deployment on multiple devices from different manufacturers and performance improvement (both in latency and bandwidth consumption) while comparing with traditional data dissemination scenarios