Privilege Aware Menus: How to adapt menu structures of Rich Internet Application to user privileges

摘要

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are of increasing importance nowadays. They are mainly still user interfaces to a server sided web application, but they also offer engaging user experiences which until recently were only known in traditional web applications. Thus, they combine the best of the two worlds. RIAs usually come as a single, precompiled file which can be run on dedicated platforms (e.g. Adobe Flash Player or as a Java Applet). However, this leads to a problem: They are always delivered as whole; i.e. they always include the complete application logic. But more often than not, a specific user isn't allowed to use all of these functions, but rather a subset of it. When he or she logs in, the RIA has to adopt its presentation to the user's privileges so that the user can only access his personalized subset of functionalities. In this paper, we will present a mechanism which allows for easy runtime adoption of the RIA's menu and navigation structures to the current user's privileges and will present a software system where this approach has been successfully applied.