A UI-Centric Approach for the End-User Development of Multidevice Mashups

Abstract

In recent years, models, composition paradigms, and tools for mashup development have been proposed to support the integration of information sources, services and APIs available on the Web. The challenge is to provide a gate to a "programmable Web," where end users are allowed to construct easily composite applications that merge content and functions so as to satisfy the long tail of their specific needs. The approaches proposed so far do not fully accommodate this vision. This article, therefore, proposes a mashup development framework that is oriented toward the End-User Development. Given the fundamental role of user interfaces (UIs) as a medium easily understandable by the end users, the proposed approach is characterized by UI-centric models able to support a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) specification of data integration and service orchestration. It, therefore, contributes to the definition of adequate abstractions that, by hiding the technology and implementation complexity, can be adopted by the end users in a kind of "democratic" paradigm for mashup development. This article also shows how model-to-code generative techniques translate models into application schemas, which in turn guide the dynamic instantiation of the composite applications at runtime. This is achieved through lightweight execution environments that can be deployed on the Web and on mobile devices to support the pervasive use of the created applications.

End-user composition of interactive applications through actionable UI components

“…1, circle 1). Thus, Tyrion drags & drops the latitude and longitude SongKick attributes into the respective fields (called Visual Renderers [10]) of the map UI template (Fig. 1, circle 2).…”

“…The proposed model refines and extends the one presented in [10]. It has been iteratively refined by adding further components starting from requirements we gathered during our research, namely: i) a different way to integrate service data by means of join and union operations for data mashup; ii) the Actionable UI Components that implement some Transformative User eXperience principles [8,30]; iii) the polymorphic data sources to access LOD.…”

“…the original model presented in [10] where data mashup was conceived just as a visual aggregation of different data sources by means of union and merge sub-templates. In that case, the result of the data mashup could not be reused with other UI templates.…”

“…The manual category then refers to those tools that do not provide any support to the users during the mashup creation. 10 …”

“…Each single component can also provide views over the huge quantity of data exposed by online Web services and APIs or in any data source, even personal or locally provided sources. With respect to the definition of UI components given in [10,42], we promote the notion of Actionable UI components, which introduce varying functions to allow end users to manipulate the contained data.…”