Developing end-user tailorable Web applications using a compositional framework

摘要

Since Web-based applications are typically required to accommodate a rapid development cycle and be adaptable to the needs of heterogeneous communities of users, the ability to continue evolving after deployment (tailoring) is regarded as a valuable property for any software accessible via a WWW-browser interface. This article introduces a reusable compositional framework to support the development of end-user-tailorable applications for the Web. This framework defines the composition of tailorable applications with an object-scripting technique, based on nested compositional markup specifications. Application tailorability is achieved through the use of a 'visualizer' pattern that allows decoupling of tailoring interfaces from primitive components and recomposing fragments of an application at runtime. The framework permits the application of multiple tailoring interfaces (visualizers) to an application instance, reusing tailoring interfaces across multiple application domains and allows for the evolution of visual techniques for carrying out tailoring throughout a project lifecycle. This article summarizes the experience accumulated while developing the proposed framework using the Java 2 platform and introduces two case studies that have been made on the development of remote monitoring applications in the domain of large-scale control systems in high-energy physics and interactive multimedia courseware for the Web.