Richard J. Cardone

Using XForms to simplify Web programming

The difficulty of developing and deploying commercial web applications increases as the number of technologies they use increases and as the interactions between these technologies become more complex. This paper describes a way to avoid this increasing complexity by re-examining the basic requirements of web applications. Our approach is to first separate client concerns from server concerns, and then to reduce the interaction between client and server to its most elemental: parameter passing. We define a simplified programming model for form-based web applications and we use XForms and a subset of J2EE as enabling technologies. We describe our implementation of an MVC-based application builder for this model, which automatically generates the code needed to marshal input and output data between clients and servers. This marshalling uses type checking and other forms of validation on both clients and servers. We also show how our programming model and application builder support the customization of web applications for different execution targets, including, for example, different client devices.

An authoring technology for multidevice Web applications

The rapid proliferation of mobile computing devices has increased the complexity and cost of cross-platform application development. Multidevice authoring technology (MDAT) lets developers build a generic application common to multiple devices and customize it for specific devices. We developed MDAT an end-to-end development methodology and toolset, to reduce the complexity of creating interactive, form-based Web applications that execute on heterogeneous devices. Web application refers to conventional, servlet-based Web applications as well as portlet applications. A portlet is a Web application component that a Web portal server aggregates with other portlets.