Distributed orchestration of user interfaces

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWorkflow management systems focus on the coordination of people and work items, service composition approaches on the coordination of service invocations, and, recently, web mashups have started focusing on the integration and coordination of pieces of user interfaces (UIs), e.g., a Google map, inside simple web pages. While these three approaches have evolved in a rather isolated fashion -although they can be seen as evolution of the componentization and coordination idea from people to services to UIs -in this paper we describe a component-based development paradigm that conciliates the core strengths of these three approaches inside a single model and language. We call this new paradigm distributed UI orchestration, so as to reflect the mashup-like and process-based nature of our target applications. In order to aid developers in implementing UI orchestrations, we equip the described model and language with suitable design, deployment, and runtime instruments, covering the whole life cycle of distributed UI orchestrations.

Stateful SOA-conformant Services as Building Blocks for Interactive Software Systems

“…However, it can only handle trivial user interaction with one-step input and output through such a generated GUI. For combining the access of independent services, MashUp UIs can be constructed, but cannot be reused by other services / UIs [3].…”

BPMN Task Instance Streaming for Efficient Micro-task Crowdsourcing Processes

“…For instance, both CrowdFlower and Amazon Mechanical Turk provide implementations of these abstract functions. The approach to provide support for crowdsourcing processes is similar to the one already successfully adopted in prior works [6]: In order to provide insight into micro-task instance terminations, we extend the syntax and semantics of BPMN with two new modeling constructs, a crowd task and a streaming connector, that are specifically tailored to the needs of crowdsourcing. The streaming connector answers the need for a novel data passing technique that supports the grouping, splitting and multiplication of streaming data as well as the passing of data between the process and the crowd tasks.…”

Model-Driven Composition of Information Systems from Shared Components and Connectors

“…To cater for such evolving requirements and support continuous evolution, at any point in time, the developer may further extend or adapt the deployed information system by starting a new modelling iteration 8 . In every iteration, the deployed application can be extended with new components or existing ones can be adapted or replaced.…”

“…For example, a recent work in the area of web service composition proposed to also include the distributed orchestration of user interfaces (UI) [8]. They focus on extending web service standards such as WSDL [9] and BPEL [10] to integrate support for so-called UI components representing complete web applications.…”