A visual environment for dynamic web application composition

Abstract

HTML-based interface technologies enable end-users to easily use various remote Web applications. However, it is difficult for endusers to compose new integrated tools of both existing Web applications and legacy local applications such as spreadsheets, chart tools and database. In this paper, the authors propose a new framework where end-users can wrap remote Web applications into visual components called pads, and functionally combine them together through drag & drop-paste operations. The authors use, as the basis, a meme media architecture IntelligentPad that was proposed by the second author. In the IntelligentPad architecture, each visual component called a pad has slots as data I/O ports. By pasting a pad onto another pad users can integrate their functionalities. The framework presented in this paper allows users to visually create a wrapper pad for any Web application by defining HTML nodes within the Web application to work as slots. Examples of such a node include input-forms and text strings on Web pages. Users can directly manipulate both wrapped Web applications and wrapped local legacy tools on their desktop screen to define application linkages among them. Since no programming expertise is required to wrap Web applications or to functionally combine them together, end-users can build new integrated tools of both wrapped Web applications and local legacy applications.

Web‐application composition through direct editing of Web documents and multiplexing of information access scenarios

“…In Snap [8], connections between components are created using queries that are parametrized. Moreover, in the meme media system IntelligentPad [9,10], a framework is provided to create functional components from Web applications by having the user specify a portion of a Web application as an input-output port for data called a slot [11]. In this framework, the user can define functional linkages by joining input-output ports for the Web applications that have been broken down into components.…”

“…In this framework, the HTML-Path [11] is used in order to designate a portion of a Web document. HTMLPath is a subset of XPath used to specify a component of an XML document.…”

Meme Media for Clipping and Combining Web Resources

“…This new model of publishing, reediting and redistributing intellectual resources assumes that all these operations can be performed only through direct manipulation. Meme-media technologies proposed by our group [17,18,12,19], when applied to the Web, realize this new model, and make the Web work as a meme pool of intellectual resources. They provide the direct manipulation operations necessary for reediting and redistributing intellectual resources.…”

“…We will propose a general framework for clipping arbitrary Web contents as live objects, for defining IO ports on such a clip, and for the recombination and linkage of such clips. In our previous works, we proposed two separate frameworks for these three purposes; one works for the first two [19,20,12], and the other for the last [9]. The mechanism for the latter is not reported elsewhere yet.…”

Component-Based Content Linking Beyond the Application

“…However, it is less suitable for dealing with the specific problem of handling and linking sets of resources provided by these services in a uniform way. As an example for a more manual approach to application composition, [9] proposes the enduser-driven definition and wiring of components that wrap existing Web applications. The idea has advantages in cases where there is no Web service interface to build on, but entails the same problems that are common to all Web site wrapping strategies, e.g.…”