A Metadata Approach for Building Web Application User Interface

摘要

In building a web application, a special attention is given on how the user interface is created. Although it seems that there are millions of ways in building web application user interfaces, experienced web application developers are usually familiar with particular "patterns". Nevertheless, user interfaces are often still developed from scratch, even if they are built based on existing applications. This makes web application user interface development a repetitive job. Furthermore, changes on the user interfaces often require a lot of work. This paper explores metadata as an approach to store the elements of user interfaces, so that the elements can be managed dynamically without having to go through the codes. We provide a preliminary metadata model of user interface elements of web applications in an entity-relationship model. We develop our model based on the nature of tree structure of the HTML documents. The metadata model is thus stored the elements of an HTML document as well as how these elements are related to each other in a typical hierarchical (parent-child) form of relationship. The metadata model will be a part of a metadata-based web application user interface generator.