Adaptive UIX Layer for University Information SOA-BUS

Abstract

IntroductionThe development of User Interfaces (UI) has been a topic of interest both for academia and industry since the early 1980s. During the time a constant evolution has occurred in the field and such an evolution has been coupled with a continuous effort to develop new methods and strategies to create UIs in effective and efficient ways [3].UIX (User Interface XML) is a set of technologies that constitute a framework for building web applications. The main focus of UIX is the user presentation layer of an application, with additional functionality for managing events and the state of the application flow. UIX is designed to create applications with page-based navigation, such as an online human resources application, rather than full-featured applications requiring advanced interaction, such as an integrated development environment (IDE) [4].An application can interact with UIX in predefined places called decision points, where a decision is made by the operator or a certain action routine is automatically triggered. Execution of an action terminates in a new decision point. The application's structure is provided to UIX in configuration files, which can be ASCII files, databases, or resource files. UIX includes Java class libraries, APIs, XML languages, and other technologies for developing different aspects of web-based applications [5].2Responsive Web Design (RWD)Nowadays, responsive design has become a major trend in web development due to the high diversity of devices used for web browsing. According to [6] applying responsive design to existing web sites implies major reengineering due to the underlying fluid grid process. Likewise, responsive design is limited to desktop-tomobile adaptation.The expression 'responsive web design' has earned popularity in 2010 when the web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte wrote an article on the subject [7]. The same author considers that the goal of RWD consists in making a web page look equally good no matter the screen size of a device. Before the introduction of responsive web design, web designers and developers created most websites by following the principles of pixelperfect web design. Pixel-perfect web design treats a web page like a page from a magazine. In this approach, the mock-up of a web page is first created in Photoshop, and then a developer recreates that design to fit a web browser. The goal of pixel-perfect web design is to make a web page resemble the original mock-up as much as possible. But a web page is not printed on a piece of paper but viewed in a web browser. Unlike paper, a web browser is a dynamic medium. It allows a user to re-size the browser window itself, and users can also change the size of the font as well. And when this happens, web pages created with pixel-perfect web design principles often break. If a web page was optimized for a 1024 x 768 pixel screen size, for example, that web page will look quite wrong in a smaller or bigger screen [8].As the number of mobile devices that have a variety of screen sizes grows, pixel-perfect web design has become problematic. Responsive web design is an attempt to solve this problem with the following three tools [9]:* a flexible, grid-based layout;* flexible images;* media queries.Flexible grids are created by using percentage (a relative unit) instead of pixel (an absolute unit). Media queries make it possible to apply different cascading style sheets (CSS) depending on the media type and the maximum width of the device screen. With cascading style sheets, one can control images and other fixed-width elements so that they stay contained in their container blocks.Responsive web design makes a web page adjust itself in response to the screen size of a device. This means that there is no longer one fixed layout in which the elements of a web page are permanently placed. Instead, as the size of the screen changes, the layout of a web page adjusts itself and rearranges the elements of the page. …