Piero Fraternali

The IDEA Web lab

With the spreading of the World Wide Web as a uniform and ubiquitous interface to computer applications and information, novel opportunities are offered for introducing significant changes in all organizations and their processes. This demo presents the IDEA Web Laboratory (Web Lab), a Web-based software design environment available on the Internet, which demonstrates a novel approach to the software production process on the Web.

Human Computation for Organizations: Socializing Business Process Management

The advent of human computation fostered by the massive diffusion of social media in personal life will change also the workplace. We are witnessing the emergence of Social Business Process Management, defined as the integration of business process management with social media, with the aim of enhancing the enterprise performance by means of a controlled participation of external stakeholders to process design and enactment. This Chapter discusses a model-driven approach to the design of participatory and socially enacted business processes. Our proposal comprises a methodology for identifying relevant social requirements in business processes, a notation for expressing social process aspects (formulated as a BPMN 2.0 extension), and a technical framework for implementing social processes as Web applications integrated with public or private Web social networks. The work is part of the ongoing BPM4People project, an initiative funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission.

IFML by examples

This chapter provides a sample of realistic applications, inspired from real-world popular ones, and describes how they can be modeled in using the Interaction Flow Modeling Language (IFML). More precisely, the chapter covers two large modeling examples: the first is a mobile app tailored to smartphones, providing an online photo and video-sharing service that allows people to take pictures and videos, apply digital effects to them, and share them on several social networks; the second one illustrates an online auction site, inspired by some very popular web applications, where people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and even services from all around the world. Both cases are thoroughly modeled with IFML. Design patterns are applied.

IFML in a Nutshell

This chapter provides a birds eye view of IFML. The chapters presents the main language concepts: ViewContainers, ViewComponents, Events, InteractionFlows, Parameters, ParameterBindings and Actions. IFML concepts are referred to the elements of the Model-View-Controller design pattern. These concepts are illustrated in a small, yet complete, example. The chapter also highlights the role and benefits of IFML in the application development cycle.

Modeling the composition of the user interface

This chapter illustrates the IFML constructs for representing the general organization of the interface independently of the content published in the view. Two types of organizations are possible: one typical of web applications, where multiple peer-level ViewContainers embody the content and navigation of the interface; one typical of desktop, mobile, and rich Internet applications, where the interface is hosted within a top level container with an internal structure of nested sub-containers. It discusses the concepts of visibility and relevance of ViewContainers and of content-independent navigation. These notions permit the designer to sketch a realistic model of the high-level navigation that can be transformed into a prototype of the interface manually or with the help of tools. The IFML concepts introduced in the chapter are applied to the modeling of interface organization patterns for web, desktop, and mobile applications.

Tools for model-driven development of interactive applications

This chapter exemplifies the support to IFML model-driven development with the help of a specific tool, called WebRatio. WebRatio is a composite application development tool that covers not only the front-end design, but also domain modeling, business logic modeling, and process modeling, thus providing an end-to-end approach to model-driven development. The chapter also mentions more tools, which are either already IFML-ready, or can be customized to model application front-ends with IFML, through UML profiling or metamodeling.

Implementation of applications specified with IFML

This chapter delves into the discussion on how to map the platform-independent IFML models into specific technological platforms. Ideally, the mapping to the implementation layer could be illustrated for any software architecture that supports user’s interactivity. For space reasons, this chapter restricts the illustration to four main categories of platforms that represent a good sample of the current status of the practice: pure HTML with a template based approach (specifically, on so-called LAMP environments comprising Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), pure HTML with a presentation a framework (namely, Spring, one of the most popular web presentation frameworks based on the Model-View-Controller pattern), rich internet (specifically, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - AJAX), and mobile applications (Android is chosen as a representative of native mobile application development).

Chapter 3 – Domain modeling

This chapter addresses domain modeling. IFML does not prescribe a specific domain modelling language but can be interfaced to any notation preferred that expresses the objects and associations of the application domain. The chapter employs UML class diagrams, and briefly recaps their main features for structural modeling. It discusses design patterns for the domain model, which stem from the joint consideration of data representation and interaction support requirements. The chapter ends with the specification of the domain model of an e-mail application.

Modeling business actions

The chapter discusses the IFML concept of Action, which describes a black-box component that embodies arbitrary business logic triggered from the interface. Actions can be connected to interface elements with navigation and data flows to enable parameter passing. The chapter illustrates several design patterns involving actions, mostly for updating the objects and associations of the domain model. In addition, system events and notification are exemplified.

Modeling interface content and navigation

The chapter addresses the specification of the content and navigation aspects of the interface and shows how to use ViewContainers, Events, NavigationFlows, and DataFlows to describe many configurations. The readability of models is enhanced by using more specific ViewComponents, such as List and Details, which make diagram more understandable and amenable to deeper checking and more thorcode generation. The chapter explains the input -output depenbetween ViewComponents, which are essential for specifying the runtime update of interface content induced by user events. The introduced IFML constructs are shown at work in the specification of different categories of design patterns for content publication, data entry, and searching. The chapter resumes specification of the running case, refining the interface model with the content publication components and the content-dependent navigation flows.