Design and Implementation of Intermediate Representation and Framework for Web Applications

Abstract

By the spread of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs),Web applications are becoming more convenient to use. Although there are many RIA technologies such as Ajax, JavaFX, Flex and Silverlight, by far there seems no common technique for specifying RIAs. The absence of the technique is considered inconvenient, especially when using RIAs in business. Hence, currentWeb applications heavily depend on the technology they use. Therefore, when the technology becomes obsolete, developers have to redevelop their applications by using other RIA technologies. Transforming an existing RIA to another through an intermediate representation is one of the solutions for it, but few attempts seem to have been made by this method. In this paper, we realize this, especially focusing on UI, by using an intermediate representation and a framework. The intermediate representation we propose here is in an XML format and provides an easy way of specifying a RIA for developers. The UI information is categorized into three parts: an widget part, a style part and a behavior part, which are held in a DOM tree, a CSSOM-like tree and an abstract syntax tree for ECMAScript, respectively. Moreover, the framework provides a default implementation in Java so that developers can easily extend it, if necessary. We show that the proposed method can solve the problem through an example of transforming a Web application from DHTML to JavaFX.