Research On Methods Of Service-oriented User Interface Modeling

Service-Oriented Computing is a distributed, loosely coupling computing model based on SOA architecture, where the research mainly focuses on creating, publishing, finding and composing of services. However, the services which are currently researched are mostly application business functional services, User Interface functionality of application system is not defined as a special kind of service and little discussion is made on User Interface services accordingly. In the development of Service-Oriented application system, the design and development of User Interfaces lack the support of Service-Oriented concept, and continue to use existing theory and methods in traditional software engineering. The pervasiveness and integrity of Service-Oriented software engineering method are thus definitely reduced.Facing this situation, it is studied on how to put User Interface (UI) which is an important part in software system development into Service-Oriented software engineering, exploring the methods of UI service abstracting and describing, modeling and describing of UI interactions, as well as the method of integrating UI and business functional services. The Service-Oriented software engineering methods are enhanced. A few innovative progresses are gained as follows:①UI service and the composition models based on user tasks are proposed to realize the creating, describing, finding and binding of UI services and composing of complex user interfaces.②UI Service Description Language (UISDL) and Abstract User Interface Composition Description Language (AUICDL) based on XML are proposed preliminarily according to the UI service model and the UI composing model. UISDL is used to describe the UI services which have UI components encapsulated. AUICDL is used to describe the UI composed of UI components (services). UISDL is the base to realize the publishing, finding, selecting and binding of UI services and AUICDL describes how to compose the final user interfaces.③A Service-Oriented User Interface composition and integration framework is proposed. With the instruction described in AUICDL associated with the task in business process and specific context arguments, the reusable UI components deployed as services in the network are composed into a self-adaptive user interface as to support users to perform their tasks.