Context-aware UI component reuse for web service development environments

Abstract

Adapting user interfaces (UIs) to various contexts, such as for the exploding number of different devices, or specific business processes in different companies,has become a major challenge for UI developers. The support offered by current development environments for UI adaptation is limited, as is the support for the efficient creation of UIs in web service-based applications. Even with sophisticated UI development environments, UI developers still encounter many repetitive, time-consuming tasks during the UI development process. In this thesis, we describe an approach where based on a given context a complete user interface is suggested. The suggestions are created by a rule based recommender system, which combines web service-bound UI elements with other UI building blocks. Rules for the UI Layout, Theme (the style sheet), Binding of UI building blocks to web services and Composition of UI components are established, and saved in a knowledge base for later reuse. Rules are created automatically based on the creation or modification of UIs. The approach has been implemented, as well as evaluated by simulating the development of 115 SAP UI screens.