Towards Low-cost Feature-rich Web User Interfaces

Web-based user interfaces are used widely. They are replacing conventional desktop-based user interfaces in many domains and are emerging as front-ends for online businesses. The technologies for web user interfaces have advanced considerably to support high-quality user interfaces. However, the usability of web interfaces continues to be an issue. We still encounter web forms where basic interactive features are missing or work unexpectedly. User interface is a costly and error-prone area of software construction. This is particularly true for web user interfaces. They are typically implemented with fewer reusable components on programmers' toolboxes than conventional user interfaces built using user interface frameworks such as Windows Forms, Cocoa, and Qt. Consequently, web interface programmers tend to struggle with low productivity, or low quality and high defect rates. This thesis focuses on property models, a declarative approach to programming user interfaces. In this approach, common user interface behaviors are automatically derived from the specifications of the data manipulated by user interfaces. The approach aims to reuse user interface algorithms that are common across interfaces and allow the programmers to focus on application-specific concerns. This thesis work is a part of project "hotdrink," a JavaScript implementation of the property model system, which has the goal of providing the benefits of property models for web interfaces. This thesis builds on previous work on property models, and adds to it three reusable help and convenience features, which can be especially useful for web forms. In particular, this thesis describes the generic mechanisms of the following user interface features: (1) validating data coming from a user and presenting useful messages that help the user to fix errors, (2) controlling the flow of data through "pinning," and (3) canceling the user's previous actions through undoing. The main contributions of the thesis are the mechanisms and the software architecture that enable implementing these behaviors in a reusable manner. This thesis also presents several examples to illustrate the benefits of the proposed mechanisms

Conceptual design of sound, custom composition languages

Service composition, web mashups, and business process modeling are based on the composition and reuse of existing functionalities, user interfaces, or tasks. Composition tools typically come with their own, purposely built composition languages, based on composition techniques like data flow or control flow, and only with minor distinguishing features-besides the different syntax. Yet, all these composition languages are developed from scratch, without reference specifications (e.g., XML schemas), and by reasoning in terms of low-level language constructs. That is, there is neither reuse nor design support in the development of custom composition languages. We propose a conceptual design technique for the construction of custom composition languages that is based on a generic composition reference model and that fosters reuse. The approach is based on the abstraction of common composition techniques into high-level language features, a set of reference specifications for each feature, and the assembling of features into custom languages by guaranteeing their soundness. We specifically focus on mashup languages

Integration of relational database metadata and XML technology to develop an abstract framework to generate automatic and dynamic web entry forms.

Developing interactive web application systems requires a large amount of effort on designing database, system logic and user interface. These tasks are expensive and error-prone. Web application systems are accessed and used by many different sets of people with different backgrounds and numerous demands. Meeting these demands requires frequent updating for Web application systems which results in a very high cost process. Thus, many attempts have been made to automate, to some degree, the construction of Web user interfaces. Three main directions have been cited for this purpose. The first direction suggested of generating user interfaces from the application¿s data model. This path was able to generate the static layout of user interfaces with dynamic behaviour specified programmatically. The second tendency suggested deployment of the domain model to generate both, the layout of a user interface and its dynamic behaviour. Web applications built based on this approach are most useful for domain-specific interfaces with a relatively fixed user dialogue. The last direction adopted the notion of deploying database metadata to developing dynamic user interfaces. Although the notion was quite valuable, its deployment did not present a generic solution for generating a variety of types of dynamic Web user interface targeting several platforms and electronic devices. This thesis has inherited the latter direction and presented significant improvements on the current deployment of this tendency. This thesis aims to contribute towards the development of an abstract framework to generate abstract and dynamic Web user interfaces not targeted to any particular domain or platform. To achieve this target, the thesis proposed and evaluates a general notion for implementing a prototype system that uses an internal model (i.e. database metadata) in conjunction with XML technology. Database metadata is richer than any external model and provides the information needed to build dynamic user interfaces. In addition, XML technology became the mainstream of presenting and storing data in an abstract structure. It is widely adopted in Web development society because of its ability to be transformed into many different formats with a little bit of effort. This thesis finds that only Java can provide us with a generalised database metadata based framework. Other programming languages apply some restrictions on accessing and extracting database metadata from numerous database management systems. Consequently, JavaServlets and relational database were used to implement the proposed framework. In addition, Java Data Base Connectivity was used to bridge the two mentioned technologies. The implementation of our proposed approach shows that it is possible and very straightforward to produce different automatic and dynamic Web entry forms that not targeted at any platform. In addition, this approach can be applied to a particular domain without affecting the main notion or framework architecture. The implemented approach demonstrates a number of advantages over the other approaches based on external or internal models

An Open Framework for Integrating Widely Distributed Hypermedia Resources

The success of the WWW has served as an illustration of how hypermedia functionality can enhance access to large amounts of distributed information. However, the WWW and many other distributed hypermedia systems offer very simple forms of hypermedia functionality which are not easily applied to existing applications and data formats, and cannot easily incorporate alternative functions which would aid hypermedia navigation to and from existing documents that have not been developed with hypermedia access in mind. This paper describes the extension to a distributed environment of the open hypermedia functionality of the Microcosm system, which is designed to support the provision of hypermedia access to a wide range of source material and application, and to offer straightforward extension of the system to incorporate new forms of information access

Industrial implementation of intelligent system techniques for nuclear power plant condition monitoring

As the nuclear power plants within the UK age, there is an increased requirement for condition monitoring to ensure that the plants are still be able to operate safely. This paper describes the novel application of Intelligent Systems (IS) techniques to provide decision support to the condition monitoring of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) reactor cores within the UK. The resulting system, BETA (British Energy Trace Analysis) is deployed within the UK’s nuclear operator and provides automated decision support for the analysis of refuelling data, a lead indicator of the health of AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor) nuclear power plant cores. The key contribution of this work is the improvement of existing manual, labour-intensive analysis through the application of IS techniques to provide decision support to NPP reactor core condition monitoring. This enables an existing source of condition monitoring data to be analysed in a rapid and repeatable manner, providing additional information relating to core health on a more regular basis than routine inspection data allows. The application of IS techniques addresses two issues with the existing manual interpretation of the data, namely the limited availability of expertise and the variability of assessment between different experts. Decision support is provided by four applications of intelligent systems techniques. Two instances of a rule-based expert system are deployed, the first to automatically identify key features within the refuelling data and the second to classify specific types of anomaly. Clustering techniques are applied to support the definition of benchmark behaviour, which is used to detect the presence of anomalies within the refuelling data. Finally data mining techniques are used to track the evolution of the normal benchmark behaviour over time. This results in a system that not only provides support for analysing new refuelling events but also provides the platform to allow future events to be analysed. The BETA system has been deployed within the nuclear operator in the UK and is used at both the engineering offices and on station to support the analysis of refuelling events from two AGR stations, with a view to expanding it to the rest of the fleet in the near future