A UI-driven approach to facilitating effective development of rich and composite web applications

It is well-recognized that the development of user interfaces is one of the most time-consuming tasks in the overall application development process. At the same time, there is an increasing demand for rich and fluid user interfaces from web users. As a result, developers are facing increasing challenges in delivering web applications, especially those with rich UI requirements. In this thesis we present two solutions to facilitate the execution and rapid development of web applications with rich user interfaces. The first solution is a rich internet application (RIA) framework aimed at providing high usability and productivity to web applications, while the second solution is a UI integration framework that simplifies web application development by facilitating the composition of reusable UI components. The foundation of our RIA framework is an XML-based high-level protocol for communicating asynchronous events and incremental UI updates on the web. The protocol facilitates rich and highly interactive UI, while at the same time eliminates frequent and slow page refreshes and provides a more responsive user experience. Built on top of the protocol, a server-side runtime allows UI logic code to be executed on the server side, while a set of server-side event-driven API enables developers to implement sophisticated application-specific UI behavior. On the client side, a thin client renders UI and processes native events, but leaves application-specific logic to the server side. The thin client thus allows end users to enjoy a rich UI experience in a safe client environment, without executing any downloaded code. The proposed UI integration framework includes an abstract UI component model which allows UI components to be programmatically manipulated via events, operations, and properties, essentially exposing UI as services. To facilitate component interactions, the framework offers an event-based composition model, which allows integration logic to be specified in the form of event listeners. Composite applications are executed via a lightweight runtime middleware, which provides component adapters that allow the middleware to communicate with native UI components implemented in a variety of languages and platforms. Finally, a graphical development environment allows composite applications to be built in a drag-and-drop fashion

Ten Years of Rich Internet Applications: A Systematic Mapping Study, and Beyond

BACKGROUND: The term Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) is generally associated with Web appli- cations that provide the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. Ten years after the introduction of the term, an ample amount of research has been carried out to study various aspects of RIAs. It has thus become essential to summarize this research and provide an adequate overview. OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study is to assemble, classify and analyze all RIA research performed in the scienti c community, thus providing a consolidated overview thereof, and to identify well-established topics, trends and open research issues. Additionally, we provide a qualitative discussion of the most inter- esting ndings. This work therefore serves as a reference work for beginning and established RIA researchers alike, as well as for industrial actors that need an introduction in the eld, or seek pointers to (a speci c subset of) the state-of-the-art. METHOD: A systematic mapping study is performed in order to identify all RIA-related publications, de ne a classi cation scheme, and categorize, analyze, and discuss the identi ed research according to it. RESULTS: Our source identi cation phase resulted in 133 relevant, peer-reviewed publications, published between 2002 and 2011 in a wide variety of venues. They were subsequently classi ed according to four facets: development activity, research topic, contribution type and research type. Pie, stacked bar and bubble charts were used to visualize and analyze the results. A deeper analysis is provided for the most interesting and/or remarkable results. CONCLUSION: Analysis of the results shows that, although the RIA term was coined in 2002, the rst RIA-related research appeared in 2004. From 2007 there was a signi cant increase in research activity, peaking in 2009 and decreasing to pre-2009 levels afterwards. All development phases are covered in the identi ed research, with emphasis on \design" (33%) and \implementation" (29%). The majority of research proposes a \method" (44%), followed by \model" (22%), \methodology" (18%) and \tools" (16%); no publications in the category \metrics" were found. The preponderant research topic is \models, methods and methodologies" (23%) and to a lesser extent, \usability & accessibility" and \user interface" (11% each). On the other hand, the topic \localization, internationalization & multi-linguality" received no attention at all, and topics such as \deep web" (under 1%), \business processing", \usage analysis", \data management", \quality & metrics", (all under 2%), \semantics" and \performance" (slightly above 2%) received very few attention. Finally, there is a large majority of \solution proposals" (66%), few \evaluation research" (14%) and even fewer \validation" (6%), although the latter are increasing in recent years

XUPClient- a Thin Client for Rich Internet Applications

Abstract. With the help of rich web client technologies, developers are creating rich internet applications in response to end users ' growing demand in richer web experiences. However, most of these technologies are fat client based. That is, to enable rich user interfaces, application code, whether binary or script, must be downloaded and executed on the client side. In this paper, we propose a thin client based approach- XUPClient, a rich web client aimed at closing the gap between web and desktop user interfaces. XUPClient allows end users to interact with rich UI components only found in desktop environment, while remaining thin in terms of application logic; i.e. all application code resides on the server side, and the client only renders declarative UI definitions. XUPClient is built on top of the Extensive User Interface Protocol (XUP), a SOAPbased protocol for communicating events and incremental user interface updates on the web.