Building blocks for Web applications

Abstract

Web applications are more and more becoming part in our daily Internet life. It has become crucial for every company, city and even geographical region to present itself on the WWW and to offer its business and information to the user. But the development and maintenance of these highly interactive Web sites should be inexpensive for the owner of the service. There is a need for cost effective solutions that are flexible enough to enable the city (company or region, respectively) present its data and services on one side, and be interesting enough for the user to come back and visit the pages again on the other side. This paper outlines the concepts and solutions used in a regional Web portal (http://www.klinform.de) developed for the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany. It shows the ideas behind the underlying building blocks that enable a Web developer to plug together all the information he needs to present a new view upon the data included in these before mentioned building blocks.