BUS: a Browser based User interface Service for Web based applications

Abstract

The growing complexity of Web based applications have uncovered software engineering problems in developing and maintaining these systems. The current Web application development and maintenance environment lacks the architectural models that are used in the development of other systems. The paper introduces a Browser User-interface Service (BUS) that offers an object oriented presentation language to build custom Web user interfaces that dynamically connect to application components. The components are able to reuse HTML, Javascript, and stylesheet content using prototype inheritance and dynamically bind presentation objects with data supplied in XML format. The BUS is designed to be platform, Web server, and browser independent, and use XML messages on TCP sockets to communicate with distributed application component processes. The BUS is a flexible component that is intended to improve consistency and flexibility in Web interface design and application maintenance. The BUS is also an integration component that can connect a custom user interface to multiple distributed application components.