Separation of concerns for distributed cross-platform context-aware user interfaces

• Published in: Cluster computing Vol. 20; no. 3; pp. 2355 - 2362
• Main Authors: Cemus, Karel, Klimes, Filip, Kratochvil, Ondrej, Cerny, Tomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.09.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Case studies; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Context; Decomposition; Energy consumption; Layouts; Localization; Maintenance; Operating Systems; Processor Architectures; Separation; Software; Software development; Subject specialists; User interface; User interfaces; Code generation; Aspect-oriented programming; User interface; Enterprise information systems
• ISSN: 1386-7857; 1573-7543
• DOI: 10.1007/s10586-017-0794-7

Modern applications aim to provide attractive, efficient and adaptive user interfaces (UIs). The UI code developed in conventional design approaches brings numerous of difficulties exacerbating the development and maintenance efforts resulting in limited separation of concerns. The limitation comes from multiple cross-cuts of tangled concerns, e.g. data representation tangled with layout, security, business rules, localization, etc. This results in high information restatement, code duplication, and tedious maintenance. This paper introduces an approach that separates UI concerns bringing a single focal point for particular concern definitions improving readability and maintenance. The approach performs concern tangling at runtime through a weaver considering the contextual information influencing the result. This enables UI context-awareness, while significantly reduces the development and maintenance efforts. Furthermore, we apply this approach into a distributed environment, which allows us to construct the same UI on various platforms and devices involving a single concerns description streamed from the server.