Towards a Hybrid Approach for Adapting Web Graphical User Interfaces to Heterogeneous Devices Using Context

Abstract

Ubiquitous Computing promises seamless access to a wide range of applications and Internet-based services from anywhere, at anytime, and using any device. In this scenario, new challenges for the practice of software development arise: Applications and services must keep a coherent behavior, a proper appearance, and must adapt to a plenty of contextual usage requirements and hardware aspects. Especially, due to its interactive nature, the interface content of Web applications must adapt to a large diversity of devices and contexts. In order to overcome such obstacles, this work introduces an innovative methodology for content adaptation of Web 2.0 interfaces. The basis of our work is to combine static adaption — the implementation of static Web interfaces; and dynamic adaptation — the alteration, during execution time, of static interfaces so as for adapting to different contexts of use. In hybrid fashion, our methodology benefits from the advantages of both adaptation strategies — static and dynamic. In this line, we designed and implemented UbiCon, a framework over which we tested our concepts through a case study and through a development experiment. Our results show that the hybrid methodology over UbiCon leads to broader and more accessible interfaces, and to faster and less costly software development. We believe that the UbiCon hybrid methodology can foster more efficient and accurate interface engineering in the industry and in the academy.

A Service Layer for Building GSM Positioning Systems in E-Health Domain

“…This service provides functionalities to analyze the context information of the devices at runtime and perform the hybrid strategy for user interface adaptation [22]. Such a strategy combines static adaptation, by building a few generic versions of the interface for some device groups, with dynamic adaptation, through the adaptation of snippets of the code already built using context information about devices at runtime.…”

“…For the health domain discussed in this work the ContentAdaptationWS service for accomplishing the dynamic adaptation part has been developed. In this case, the Java Document Object Model (DOM) API [22] has been used for enabling the manipulation and the transformation of eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) documents at execution time. DOM API allows the reading and the writing of these documents in the memory by structuring them into a DOM object tree (e.g.…”

Run-time adaptation of modalities of interaction and context of use in web mobile apps

“…The interaction in mobile devices create a new demand for the developers. They are forced to deal with the context in which the application will be used [7,15]. Context of use emcompasses a set of elements as such as users preferences, device capabilities and environmental.…”

“…Context of use emcompasses a set of elements as such as users preferences, device capabilities and environmental. These elements together provide the information about the context of use [12,7]. Besides of questions about the user experience, by treating the aspects relevants to the context of user interaction the developers can enhance user performance on the apps [10,15,25].…”

Building Adaptive Rich Interfaces for Interactive Ubiquitous Applications

“…Aiming to overcome the individual shortcomings of the purely static adaptation strategy (construction of several interface versions at development time) and the purely dynamic one (adaptation of the whole code at execution time) (Viana & Andrade, 2008), and to reduce the number of versions to be developed, the process employs a hybrid adaptation approach (Cirilo et al, 2010b). This approach combines code generation from modeling at development time (facilitated by the metamodel and transformations reuse) with code generation at runtime (facilitated by the content adapters reuse).…”