Introduction to the development of modern Web applications
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) Unit of Information Systems (ISYS) Belgian Laboratory of Computer-Human Interaction (BCHI)
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
Agenda
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. What is a Web application? How to build a Web application? The past Today The future UsiXML
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
Grenoble 2007
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
2
What is a Web application?
A Web application is a program that is accessed with a Web browser over a network.
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
3
What can the user see of the application?
The user see a web page.
(technically, a User Interface).
There are multiple approaches to design them.
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
4
How to build a Web application?
Programmatic approach
button = new button();
Declarative approach
HTML
Graphical User Interface Tool generator approach
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
5
The past (The artisan times)
A experimented programmer used to create a user interface using the programmatic approach.
The results were of variable quality And the required effort to modify the web pages were huge!!
Grenoble 2007 Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
6
Today
Most of the work is done with Visual Generators or Descriptive language editors.
But the effort to create interfaces to new devices remains. Moreover, the lack of support of usability guidelines and also the problem of keeping updated (and working) our web application.
Grenoble 2007 Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
7
The future
Zero programming only models!! The programming details are left to the machines. One of the most interesting approaches is the one proposed by UsiXML, that support a methodology to create the user interfaces based on models.
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
8
UsiXML
What is UsiXML?
It is a XML-compliant User Interface Description Language
Publicly available from http://www.usixml.org
Free to use, open for access, easy to expand and touch stone of a group of tools and methodologies to develop user interfaces.
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
9
Thank you very much for your attention http://www.usixml.org
User Interface eXtensible Markup Language
For more information and downloading,
http://www.isys.ucl.ac.be/bchi
Grenoble 2007
Francisco Javier Martínez Ruiz
martinez@isys.ucl.ac.be
10