Inter-widget communication by demonstration in user interface mashups

Abstract

User Interface Mashups have become increasingly popular, as they allow end users with little programming skills to create situational Web applications on their own. Those are built by composing interactive components, so-called widgets, whose integration is achieved by the means of "inter-widget communication" (IWC). Since widgets are built by different vendors and rely on different data models, IWC rarely works "out of the box", which leaves users with the tedious task of manual wiring and limited functionality. This paper presents a semi-automatic, end-user friendly approach to extend widgets with IWC capabilities by employing the programming by demonstration paradigm. The solution is demonstrated using an extension of Apache Rave, an open-source widget composition platform. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.