Abstract not found

Mobile platforms are becoming an increasingly important alternative for accessing web pages. Many Web pages are not suited to these platforms and need to be adapted, or rewritten from scratch. Adaptation can be made in two ways: either by a dynamic conversion or by a static reengineering. VAQUITA belongs to the second category by applying a model-based approach to reverse engineer web pages at a certain level of abstraction to transfer them to other computing platforms afterwards. Instead of reverse engineering a presentation model and translating it into another model specified for a particular platform, this paper proposes a reverse engineering tailored for any target platform, even one not yet defined. The essence of this reverse engineering approach consists in composing several functions of abstraction, reflection, translation, and reification into two steps: retargeting and regenerating a web page to another platform.

Re-engineering transforms a final user interface into a logical representation that is manipulable enough to allow forward engineering to port a UI from one computing platform to another with maximum flexibility and minimal effort. Re-engineering is used to adapt a UI to another context. This adaptation is governed by two main tasks: the adaptation of the code itself to the new computing platform and the redesign of the UI to better suit the new constraints of the target platform (interaction capabilities, screen size,…). To support this process, we have developed a reverse engineering tool that allows a flexible recovery of the presentation model from Web sites, adapting the reverse engineering to the target platforms, and a forward engineering tool that converts this model into any final executable UI, in particular expressed in VRML,

Abstract. This paper defines the problem space of distributed, migratable and plastic user interfaces, and presents CAMELEON-RT 1, a technical answer to the problem. CAMELEON-RT 1 is an architecture reference model that can be used for comparing and reasoning about existing tools as well as for developing future run time infrastructures for distributed, migratable, and plastic user interfaces. We have developed an early implementation of a run time infrastructure based on the precepts of CAMELEON-RT 1. 1

In recent years, there have been a number of industry and academic efforts to standardize the representation of many types of data in order to facilitate the interoperability of applications. There is, however, no comparable effort aimed at interaction data, the data that relates to user interfaces. We introduce XIML (eXtensible Interface Markup Language), a proposed common representation for interaction data. We claim that XIML fulfills the requirements that we have found essential for a language of its type: (1) it supports design, operation, organization, and evaluation functions, (2) it is able to relate the abstract and concrete data elements of an interface, and (3) it enables knowledge-based systems to exploit the captured data. In this paper, we introduce the characteristics of XIML, its scope and validation, and a proposed path for industry adoption.

The relevance and pervasiveness of web applications as a vital part of modern enterprise systems has significantly increased in recent years. However, the lack of adequate documentation promotes the need for reverse engineering tools aiming at supporting web application maintenance and evolution tasks. A non trivial web application is a complex artifact integrating technologies such as scripting languages, middleware, web services, data warehouses and databases. The task to recover abstractions requires the adoption of dynamic analyses to complement the information gathered with static analyses. This paper presents an approach and a tool, named WANDA, that instruments web applications and combines static and dynamic information to recover the as-is architecture and, in general, the UML documentation of the application itself. To this aim we propose an extension of the Conallen UML diagrams to account for detailed dynamic information. The tool has been implemented and tested on several web applications. Its architecture has been conceived to allow easy customization and extension. The paper presents our tool in the context of a program understanding task; however, it can be usefully applied to many other tasks such as profiling, security and dependability verification and application restructuring.

Recently, a new web development technique for creating interactive web applications, dubbed AJAX, has emerged. In this new model, the single-page web interface is composed of individual components which can be updated/replaced independently. If until a year ago, the concern revolved around migrating legacy systems to web-based settings, today we have a new challenge of migrating web applications to single-page AJAX applications. Gaining an understanding of the navigational model and user interface structure of the source application is the first step in the migration process. In this paper, we explore how reverse engineering techniques can help analyze classic web applications for this purpose. Our approach, using a schema-based clustering technique, extracts a navigational model of web applications, and identifies candidate user interface components to be migrated to a single-page AJAX interface. Additionally, results of a case study, conducted to evaluate our tool, are presented. 1.

Web Applications are today becoming more and more interactive and dynamic: the pages rendered in a browser on the client side can be dynamically built by server pages according to the user inputs or requests. Moreover, even pieces of code (e.g., client-side scripts) can be dynamically generated. The comprehension of such applications, needed to effectively perform maintenance or testing, may be very hard. Indeed, for highly dynamic Web Applications, static analysis is likely to give only an imprecise and approximate picture, thus, also dynamic analysis is required to gain a proper understanding of complex and dynamic application behavior. This paper presents the integration and the enhancement of two existing Web Application reverse engineering tools: one, WARE, performing static analysis, the other, WANDA, dynamic analysis. In particular, the paper shows how the integrated toolkit can be used to identify equivalence classes from groups of dynamically built client pages, with the aim of improving comprehension. To validate the proposed approach, results from a case study are presented and discussed. 1.

In this paper, we present our perspective on Model-Based User Interfaces (hereafter MBUI) paradigm and provide with our experience in this area combining high-level knowledge-based data models (i.e. ontologies) and reverse engineering processes to carry through a pragmatic MBUI vision. Our approach is based on using End-User Development (hereafter EUD) techniques (i.e. Programming by Example) to enable the user to carry out editing tasks in a MBUI environment. This advocates an EUD-for-MBUI approach, where the system avoids the user from having to deal with interface specification languages.

This position paper shortly describes methods and tools under development to support a model-based reengineering process of user interfaces of legacy applications. This reengineering process enables the use of HCI patterns and allows an adaption of user interfaces to different contexts of use.