Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) have introduced powerful novel functionalities into the Web architecture, borrowed from client-server and desktop applications. The resulting platforms allow designers to improve the user's experience, by exploiting client-side data and computation, bidirectional client-server communication, synchronous and asynchronous events, and rich interface widgets. However, the rapid evolution of RIA technologies challenges the Model-Driven Development methodologies that have been successfully applied in the past decade to traditional Web solutions. This paper illustrates an evolutionary approach for incorporating a wealth of RIA features into an existing Web engineering methodology and notation. The experience demonstrates that it is possible to model RIA application requirements at a high-level using a platform-independent notation, and generate the client-side and server-side code automatically. The resulting approach is evaluated in terms of expressive power, ease of use, and implementability.@en

Professional mashups that include complex choreographies, data mediation, and result publishing within Web pages are still affected by implementation and design practices that rely either on very simple models or on low-level scripting and programming skills of developers, thus hampering the use of mashups in business context as rapid solution to immediate problems. Indeed, industrialization of their development is still a hard objective to achieve. We propose a design methodology based on visual models to improve the quality and the productivity of service mashups and presentation of the results, thus increasing their acceptance as professional applications in the business scenario. Existing software engineering methods are combined together in an innovative mix, comprising standard business process modeling languages (namely, BPMN) to describe a high-level view of the mashup orchestration and on WebML (Web Modeling Language) to specify the detailed Web application model, including Web service interactions, hypertext navigation, event management, and rich user interfaces.

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This chapter introduces a conceptual model for the design of Web 2.0 applications relying on rich Internet application (RIA) technologies. RIAs extend Web application features by allowing computation to be partitioned between the client and the server and support core Web 2.0 requirements, like real-time collaboration among users, sophisticated presentation and manipulation of multimedia content, and flexible human-machine interaction (synchronous and asynchronous, connected and disconnected). The proposed approach for the design of Web 2.0 applications extends a conceptual platform-independent model conceived for Web 1.0 applications with novel primitives capturing RIA features; the conceptual model can be automatically converted into implementations in all the most popular RIA technologies and frameworks like AJAX, OpenLaszlo, FLEX, AIR, Google Gears, Google Web toolkit, and Silverlight.@en

Rich Internet applications (RIAs) enable novel usage scenarios by overcoming the traditional paradigms of Web interaction. Conventional Web applications can be seen as reactive systems in which events are 1) produced by the user acting upon the browser HTML interface, and 2) processed by the server hosting the application state and logic. In RIAs, distribution of data and computation across client and server broadens the classes and features of the produced events as they can originate, be detected, notified, and processed in a variety of ways. In this work, we investigate how events can be explicitly described and coupled to the other concepts of a Web modeling language in order to specify collaborative Rich Internet applications.

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This paper addresses conceptual modeling and automatic code generation for Rich Internet Applications, a variant of Web-based systems bridging desktop and thin-client Web interfaces. We show how classical Web modeling concepts are not enough to capture the specificity of RIAs, extend an existing Web modeling language, and provide an implementation of a CASE tool for visual modeling and code generation from RIA-aware specifications. Experimentation of the proposed approach in real-world scenarios is also reported.@en

This work addresses conceptual modeling and automatic code generation for Rich Internet Applications, a variant of Web-based systems bridging the gap between desktop and Web interfaces. The approach we propose is a first step towards a full integration of RIA paradigms into the Web development process, enabling the specification of complex Web solutions mixing HTTP+HTML and Rich Internet Applications, using a single modeling language and tool.@en