A fast and flexible framework of scripting for Web application development: a preliminary experience report

Abstract

The World-Wide Web represents an opportunistic Internet-based platform on which many new applications are developing rapidly. To facilitate fast Web applications, a scripting approach is one possible solution for software developers. However, then are two major drawbacks for many existing scripting tools. First, most of these scripting tools are proprietary, and only available on chosen platforms. Second, most scripting tools use the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) as the basis for extension. To provide extra functionality such as database connection, various extended codes or commands are mixed with HTML tags to produce expected results. However, this dirty approach will make the design and development process more complicated. We propose a systematic and flexible scripting framework for fast Web application development. The two major components, layout script and information-processing script, naturally reflect the static and dynamic properties of a Web application. In addition, the information-processing script can flexibly be split into different component scripts to suit different applications. We built a prototype of a script parser and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool to quickly develop an intelligent Web-based Personal Computer Configuration Advisor. Clearly, our proposal opens up many possible directions for investigation including the uses of the IDE tool to develop other applications, and the integration with other components to handle more complicated Web applications.