The increasing use of Web-based applications continues to broaden the user groups of enterprise applications at large. Since ordinary users often equate the quality of user interface (UI) with the quality of the entire application, the importance of providing easy-to-use UIs has been significantly increasing. Unfortunately, designing a single UI satisfying all end users remains challenging. To address this issue, researchers and developers are looking to Contextaware/Adaptive UIs (CUIs) that aim to provide end users with more personalized user interaction experiences. Although multiple proposals have been made, very few production systems provide such malleable interfaces due to the excessive cost of development and maintenance.In this paper, we propose a technique that aims to reduce development and maintenance efforts of CUI to a level comparable with a single UI. Unlike most of the existing CUI approaches, our technique does not involve an external UI model. Instead, it aims to reflect runtime-information and structures already captured in the application, while extending them to provide an appropriate CUI. With this technique, developers do not design forms or tables directly for each page or panel. Instead they design generic and reusable transformation rules capable of presenting application data instances in the UI while considering the runtime context. To demonstrate our technique and its impact on CUI development and maintenance, we provide a case study. Moreover, we present our experience from its application to an existing production-level enterprise application, with high demands on performance.
Abstract-Nowadays enterprise software solutions must deal with ever-growing complexity and a multitude of business processes. The mainstream system design decomposes the system into small reusable services. While these services isolate certain system logic and address efficient elasticity towards growing user demands, there are multiple issues related to such a design, such as limitations to deal with restated information, information reuse or the ability to address cross-cutting concerns across multiple services. This paper highlights limitations of service-oriented architecture and proposes an alternative decomposition through aspect-driven service-oriented architecture. Such architecture involves adaptive, context-aware services preserving simple maintenance while addressing information reuse and crosscuts across services. The paper provides a formal description of the proposed architecture as well as a demonstration through a case study, showing approach properties and benefits.
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