Project contact: peep.kungas (at) stacc.ee

The primary goal of this sub-project is to develop technologies that would simplify the creation and use of Internet applications.The driving concept here is rich Internet applications (RIA), which covers both traditional standards like HTML, CSS and ECMAScript, and modern technologies such as AJAX, Silverlight, Flex, JavaFX, and others.

Content extraction, analysis and aggregation

This work package aims to develop techniques and technologies that would facilitate the aggregation of rich Internet components (RIC), such as widgets, gadgets or floatlets, or simpler components, and online content. Since the majority of Internet content is still unstructured and available in textual form, like online articles, this sub-project explores how to apply language technology to separate, analyse and merge textual content automatically.In addition, the work package explores techniques and frameworks that would simplify both interaction between components themselves and online content, while developing rich Internet applications.

Enhanced usability of rich Internet applications

Usability is an integral part of product development for physical products, traditional software and rich Internet applications alike. As global trends in web applications are increasingly moving towards adoption of RIAs, it is essential to understand what the application of particular technologies mean for web application users.RIAs can be built from conceptually orthogonal technologies, which is why it is necessary to understand better the total effects of these technologies for the usability of a particular piece of web application.

Although there exist globally well-known best practices available for designing modern RIAs and ensuring usability, in practice still many man-hours are spent for reaching satisfactory level of usability. Moreover, aligning usability maintenance with the entire software application life-cycle, including managing transitions from one application version to another, is still a challenge, which needs special focus..Therefore this work package aims at first specifying detailed characteristics of usability and then to provide a methodology and a set of guidelines to achieve and evaluate the characteristics

Rich Internet application cross-browser compatibility testing

One of the main challenges in cost-effective development of Internet applications is related to the large number of different browsers and their versions available, which all should provide the same level of user experience and the same behaviour when exploiting an Internet application. Although majority of these browsers and their versions are HTML compliant, there are differences in the way they visualise online content (including software applications) and in the behaviour they provide to the same content and online applications. Thus, in practice it cannot be assumed that a single web application is interpreted in the same way by all versions of all browsers. This problem is exaggerated due to widely used less-standardised RIA technologies, such as JavaScript. This is why so much effort is dedicated to redesigning online applications each time support for a new browser or its new version would be provided. Or symmetrically, this is why so many web applications are designed for and selectively tested under only some browsers leading to only partially functional Internet applications.

A solution to this problem would entail automating cross-browser compatibility testing of developed RIAs. The aim of this work package is to develop methods for automated detection of potential deviations from expected layout and behaviour under specific browsers. This would significantly increase software development productivity.

STACC News