In order to handle responses of services, an active
client page should include codes for local data
processing as well as
include codes for local data
processing as well as view navigations. The above
frameworks do not help much in the design of view
navigations. There has been intensive research on
modelling web page navigations of web applications
(Bosson 2006, Narad 2008, Gordillo 2006). Guell
et.al presented a design method from requirement
specifications to interaction and navigational
modelling (Guell 2000). Several models are
proposed for designing navigations of web
applications, and some of them allow developers to
reason about navigations using content models
(Winckler 2003, Bozzon 2006). Narad et al.
proposed an approach for enriching the navigation
experience according to actual concerns (Narad et al.
2008). There has also been navigation research in
the area of workflow and database. From workflow
process analysis, navigations can be obtained from
content models or task models (Garcia 2008). In
addition, there is a study on view integration and
cooperation using data types (May 2005). In this
paper, we are interested in view navigations on a
client page. Since this is a useful way to allow users
to compose service methods, the research results
from service compositions can be applied to the
navigational design (Lee 2008). However, while
service compositions need to find all possible
combinations, the set of view navigations should be
as small as possible to secure a better user interface.
Our new approach aims to achieve this goal by using
REST service patterns.
6 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we investigated a design method for
view navigations in a client page. As more and more
open web services are available, client pages tend to
provide more than one service. To design view
navigations in a web page, we can use similar
approaches to conventional server-side development.
We were motivated to use REST standard method
and data types in order to find an appropriate set of
view navigations.
To adopt REST service patterns into navigation
design, we presented a new diagram called VND,
which helps us to depict the relations between views
and methods. When interfacing more than one
resource, we introduced a resource interface diagram
(RID) to design at a more abstracted level. Using
these tools, we could better reason and describe
navigation relations. In addition, we could determine
a set of navigational controls for each view, applying
conventions and REST method semantics. As a
result, automatic code generation is possible for
view navigational codes, without manual
intervention.
We implemented the code generation system in
XForms language to validate the proposed approach.
The implemented result shows that the generated
navigation codes allow users to easily and
appropriately access all service methods.
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