Architecture for hypermedia dynamic applications with content and behavior constraints

Abstract

This paper deals with the generation of dynamic hypermedia applications whose content and behavior their authors may not be able to predict a priori, but which must conform to a strict set of explicitly defined constraints. In the paper, we show that it is possible to establish an architecture configuration to be followed by this special kind of dynamic applications. In the proposed architecture, templates are responsible for specifying the design patterns and the constraints to be followed. Some alternatives for distributing (from the client side to the server side) the components that comprise the architecture are discussed, and one of them is used to exemplify an instantiation of the architecture. In the instantiation, TAL (Template Authoring Language) is used to define templates. In TAL, templates are open-compositions, that is, especial set of patterns for compositions, whose content must obey some explicitly defined constraints. The paper also shows how the architecture instantiation could be used to build dynamic digital TV applications.