Executable Semantics of Recursively Nestable Dialog Flow Specifications for Web Applications

Information systems for the support of complex business processes are often equipped with web-based front-ends to allow convenient user access. To produce executable specifications of the users’ interactions with such web-based applications, we use a visual language that enables developers to model their complex dialog structures. In this paper, we introduce the formal semantics of the core constructs of this Dialog Flow Notation: We define its syntax in terms of invariants about the permitted elements and their relations, and show how any words of the language (i.e. any syntactically correct dialog flow specifications) can be mapped to a deterministic pushdown automaton whose behavior defines the notation’s semantics. This gives us and other tool developers a formal basis for the design and implementation of tools and frameworks that mirror the precise meaning of all DFN constructs

Fine-Grained Specification and Control of Data Flows in Web-based User Interfaces

When building process-intensive web applications, developers typically spend considerable effort on the exchange of specific data entities between specific web pages and operations under specific condi- tions, as called for by business requirements. Since the WWW infrastructure provides only very coarse data exchange mechanisms, we introduce a notation for the design of fine-grained conditional data flows between user interface components. These specifications can be interpreted by a data flow controller that automatically provides the data entities to the specified receivers at run-time, relieving developers of the need to implement user interface data flows manually

Minimalist Architecture to Generate Embedded System Web User Interfaces

Part 9: Embedded Systems and Petri NetsInternational audienceThis paper presents a new architecture to semi-automatically generate Web user interfaces for Embedded Systems designed using IOPT Petri Net models. The user interfaces can be used to remotely control, monitor and debug embedded systems using a standard Web Browser. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the distributed nature of the Internet to store all static user interface data and software on third-party Web services (the Cloud), and execute the user-interface code on the user’s Web Browser. A simplified protocol is proposed to enable remote control, status-monitoring, debugging and step-by-step execution, minimizing resource consumption on the physical embedded devices, including processing load, memory and communication bandwidth. As the user interface data and code are kept on third-party Web services, these resources can be shared among multiple embedded device units, and the hardware requirements to implement the devices can be simplified, leading to reduced cost solutions. To prevent down-time due to network problems or server failures, a fault-tolerant topology is suggested. The distributed architecture is transparent to end-users, observing just a Web interface for an embedded device on the other side of an Internet URL