Reusing Web Application User-Interface Controls

摘要

Highly interactive web applications that offer user experience and responsiveness of desktop applications are becoming increasingly popular. They are often composed out of visually distinctive user-interface (UI) elements that encapsulate a certain behavior - the so called UI controls. Similar controls are often used in a large number of web pages, and facilitating their reuse could offer considerable benefits. Unfortunately, because of a very short time-to-market, and a fast pace of technology development, preparing controls for reuse is usually not a primary concern. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method, and the accompanying tool, for extracting and reusing web controls. The developer selects the control and performs a series of interactions that represent the behavior he/she wishes to reuse. In the background, the execution is analyzed and all code and resources necessary for the standalone functioning of the control are extracted. Optionally, the user can immediately reuse the extracted control by automatically embedding it in an already existing page.