Process-aware continuation management in web applications

摘要

Web applications are subject to an interaction challenge not found in other user interfaces: In addition to the widgets that web pages are built of, browsers provide further navigation features such as the Back and Forward buttons that are beyond the developer's control. Continuations have been suggested as a means to cope with the arbitrary navigation patterns that users may perform using these features. While an elegant solution in theory, continuations can incur a significant memory load in practice, and may offer more navigation options than business requirements mandate. We therefore propose a dialog control logic that augments the continuation approach with strategies for automatic elimination of continuations that will likely not be needed anymore, or whose invocation shall be prevented due to business requirements. This way, we aim to realize the benefits that continuations can provide to web applications, while ameliorating the drawbacks that they exhibit in practice.