Seamlessly integrated, but loosely coupled: building user interfaces from heterogeneous components

Abstract

User interface development is a time and resource consuming task. Thus, reusing existing UI components is a desirable approach for rapid UI development. To keep UIs maintainable, those components should be loosely coupled. Composing UIs of heterogeneous components developed with different technologies, on the other hand, is a non-trivial task not supported well by currently existing integration frameworks, and there is only little progress in automatizing the integration step. In this paper, we introduce a framework for UI integration which is capable of handling heterogeneous UI components. It facilitates events annotated with RDF and ontologies for assembling user interfaces from loosely coupled components. With that framework, UIs can be composed semi-automatically, based on logic event processing rules.