No Application Is an Island: Using Topes to Transform Strings during Data Transfer

Abstract

Users and programmers frequently need to move information between applications, including desktop and web applications. Transferring data often involves reformatting strings such as phone numbers or extracting parts from them, but actually performing these transformations typically requires tedious, error-prone operations. For example, programmers must write messy code to parse and reformat strings passed between web services, while ordinary end users must manually reformat strings that they want to copy-paste between applications. In this paper, we show at an architectural level how topes can be used to smooth the flow of data between applications by automatically transforming strings on demand. We have demonstrated the generality and usefulness of this approach by using topes to automatically transform data moving between applications, web sites and web services, thereby showing how topes can make it simpler for both end users and programmers to transfer information between applications.