Introduction to the development of modern Web applications

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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)

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Agenda

• What is a Web application?
• How to build a Web application?
• The past
• Today
• The future
• UsiXML

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What is a Web application?

• A Web application is a program that is accessed
  with a Web browser over a network.

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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.

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How to build a Web application?
Programmatic approach
button new button()
Declarative approach
HTML
Graphical User Interface Tool generator approach
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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!!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Thank you very much for your attention
http//www.usixml.org User Interface eXtensible
Markup Language
For more information and downloading,http//www.i
sys.ucl.ac.be/bchi