Abstract: |
The popularity of computing devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and
mobile phones have been increasingly and these devices have been getting more powerful
every day. Although the latest PDAs are even able to display frames, it is still important
to adapt the content for these devices in order to provide a satisfactory surfing experience
for users. Web services in the near future will not only have to support mobile access, but
will also have to deal with other forms of Web access such as voice interfaces. Hence, Web
services will often need to be device-independent and will have to support different XML
Web formats.
Although much work has been done on providing mobile access to Web content, the focus
has mainly been the adaptation of HTML content to make it viewable on mobile devices that
might have memory and screen-size limitations. Only a few attempts have been made to date
to integrate device-independence into the design, implementation and maintenance phases
of Web services.
This dissertation provides solutions to the problem of designing and implementing in-
teractive, maintainable, device-independent Web services. It introduces a novel XML/XSL-
based design and implementation technique and a development tool suite to support the Web
developer. The constructed services can be accessed by a wide range of Web devices such as
mobile phones, PDAs with micro HTML browsers, speech-based Web interfaces and tradi-
tional full-fledged HTML browsers.
My general thesis is that Web services can effectively be made device-independent if
device-independence support is integrated into the Web service design, implementation and
maintenance phases. I present an extended model of the traditional Web service life cycle
that takes device-independence support into account and describe the Device-Independent
Web Engineering (DIWE) framework for engineering device-independent Web services. I
introduce the novel concepts of page splitting, process partitioning and XSL stylesheet pre-
processing.
|
