Fully automatic generation of web user interfaces for multiple devices from a high-level model based on communicative acts
Jürgen Falb, Roman Popp, Thomas Röck, Helmut Jelinek, Edin Arnautović, Hermann Kaindl · International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology · 2009
The problems involved in the development of web User Interfaces (UIs) become even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones and PDAs. Each of these devices has its own characteristics that require a special web UI. Therefore, we developed and implemented an approach to generate web UIs for multiple devices fully automatically from a high-level model. In contrast to previous approaches focusing on abstracting the UI per se, we make use of speech act theory from the philosophy of language for the specification of desired intentions in interactions. Our new approach of using communicative acts in high-level models of UIs allows their creation with less technical knowledge, since such models are easier to provide than the web UI code in a usual programming language. From one such high-level model, multiple web UIs for diverse devices can be rendered fully automatically using a number of heuristics. A generated web UI for a PDA has already been put into real-world operation and its usability was informally evaluated as good.