Extending XForms with Server-Side Functionality
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The presentation proposes extending XForms with server-side functionality to simplify web application development. It suggests a unified architecture using XForms for presentation, logic and data layers with XML as the single language and data model. The approach is implemented in the open-source XFormsDB framework. Evaluations show the approach works well for small to medium applications and widgets. In conclusions, the authors argue their XForms-based approach simplifies development by using a single paradigm across all layers.
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Extending XForms with Server-Side Functionality
- 1. Extending XForms with Server-Side Functionality Markku Laine, Denis Shestakov, Petri Vuorimaa Aalto University Finland The 27th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC'12) Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy March 26-30, 2012
- 2. Presentation is about... Web application architectures XML technologies End-user programming 2
- 3. Presentation Outline Introduction Proposed approach Proposed XForms server-side extensions The XFormsDB framework Conclusions 3
- 4. Introduction 4
- 5. Three-Tier Web Application Architecture Presentation Logic Data 5
- 6. Conventional Web Application Architecture (X)HTML Presentation JavaScript Java / Ruby / Python Logic SQL Data 6
- 7. Conventional Web Application Architecture (X)HTML XML Presentation JavaScript JSON Object-JSON Mapper Java / Ruby / Python Logic Object Object-Relational Mapper SQL Data Relational 7
- 8. Problems with the Architecture Multiple programming languages Multiple data models Multi-paradigm approach Makes the development of entire Web applications extremely complex 8
- 9. How could we simplify the architecture? ...and as a result... turn more people into Web developers. 9
- 10. Proposed Approach 10
- 11. Proposed Approach One programming language One data model One paradigm approach Unified Web application architecture 11
- 12. Proposed Approach "Everyone" knows (X)HTML, right? Let's use it as the base language 12
- 13. What about interaction? 13
- 14. Proposed Approach Prefer XForms over JavaScript XForms is even part of XHTML 2.0! 14
- 15. XForms Web Application Architecture XHTML Presentation XML XForms Logic Data 15
- 16. Proposed Web Application Architecture XHTML Presentation XML XForms XForms Logic XML XForms Data XML (XPath) 16
- 17. Proposed Web Application Architecture XHTML Presentation XML XForms XForms Logic XML XForms Data XML (XPath) 17
- 19. Proposed XForms Server-Side Extensions Definition of Server-Side Requests Submission of Server-Side Requests Notification about Server-Side Errors Permission Management Reuse of Code Fragments Seamless integration with XForms 19
- 20. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" ...> <head> <title>Notes</title> <xformsdb:include resource="xinc/meta.xinc" /> <xforms:model> <xforms:instance id="notes"> <dummy xmlns="" /> </xforms:instance> <xformsdb:instance id="select-notes"> <xformsdb:query datasrc="notes"> <xformsdb:expression>/root/notes</xformsdb:expression> </xformsdb:query> </xformsdb:instance> <xformsdb:submission id="sub-select-notes" replace="instance" instance="notes" requestinstance="select-notes" /> <xforms:send submission="sub-select-notes" ev:event="xforms-ready" /> </xforms:model> </head> <body> ... </body> </html> 20
- 21. The XFormsDB Framework 21
- 22. The XFormsDB Framework Implements the proposed extensions Supports all major Web browsers Supports various data sources Supports extensibility on all three tiers Open source! 22
- 23. Evaluation: Web Applications and Widgets 23
- 24. Conclusions 24
- 25. Conclusions • Entire Web applications can be developed using only one programming paradigm, language, and data model – Simplifies the architecture • Presentation tier technologies provide a good basis for the architecture – Especially markup languages (e.g., (X)HTML) due to their wide adoption and ease of use • Our proposed approach is based on XForms – Only a few new elements, good XML knowledge is needed • The implementing framework, XFormsDB, suits well for developing small- and medium-sized Web applications and widgets 25
- 26. Related Work • Kuuskeri, J. and Mikkonen, T. “REST Inspired Code Partitioning with a JavaScript Middleware”. In Proceedings of ICWE’10, pages 244-255, 2010. • Fourny, F. et al. “XQuery in the Browser”. In Proceedings of WWW’09, pages 1011-1020, 2009. • Laine, M. et al. “Toward Unified Web Application Development”. In IT Professional, Vol. 13, No. 5, pages 30-36, 2011. • Litvinova, E., Laine, M., and Vuorimaa, P. “XIDE: Expanding End-User Web Development”. In Proceedings of WEBIST'12, pages xxx-xxx, 2012. 26
- 27. Thank you for your attention! Markku Laine M.Sc. (Tech.), Ph.D. student +358 50 565 8179 markku.laine@aalto.fi http://media.tkk.fi/webservices/personnel/markku_laine.html 27