End-User Development of Service-based Interactive Web Applications at the Presentation Layer

摘要

Lightweight service composition approaches are gaining a fast momentum in the integration landscape, among which is the integration/composition at the presentation layer where software components are integrated using their frontends, rather than application logic or data. This paper presents a new approach for composing web services through their user interfaces (UI) to form composite web applications in a purely graphical manner without the necessity to write any programming code. Unlike existing approaches, our service composition approach is shaped by a set of iterative user based evaluations to ensure no modeling or programming skills are required for web application development. Indeed our approach is tailored towards non-programmers. This paper provides an in-depth description of the general concepts and fundamental principles of our UI-centric design time approach, a brief description of our prototype, namely the ServFace Builder which serves as a proof of concept, and evaluation results.