Component-Based Content Linking Beyond the Application

Abstract

Abstract. The content of many innovative Web sites today often originates from beyond the application. This paper is concerned with building Web applications that heavily integrate and link content from external sources, like e.g. Web services or RSS feeds. Unlike conventional applications, they are characterized by a very dynamic and distributed information space. In this context, traditional Web Engineering approaches suffer from the fact that they rely too much on a-priori knowledge of existing content structures. We present a support system and a method for building such applications in a very flexible way. Flexibility is achieved by managing links separately from the content in a dedicated Web service and by composing the application from fine-grained, reusable components that realize navigation, presentation, and interaction for the linked content.