In this paper we describe a general framework based on constraint programming techniques to address the automatic layout definition problem for Web search result pages, considering heterogeneous result items types (e.g., web links, images, videos, maps, etc.). Starting from the entity type(s) specified in the search query and the result types deemed more relevant for the given entity type, we define an optimization problem and a set of constraints that grant the optimal positioning of results in the page, modeled as a grid with assigned weights depending on the visibility.

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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

In the last years the user information seeking process on the Web has shifted from document search to object search. Hence, the answers provided by Web search engines cannot consist any more in a mere list of pages. In this paper we consider queries returning mono-, ambiguous, or multi-domain results, where the domain represents a specific field of interests such as City, People, Movies, etc. and we characterize the problem for the definition of the layout of such results. In particular, we describe a conceptual definition of the Web search result layout problem, by identifying: the parameters involved in the layout design, the tuning dimensions available for optimizing the result layout, and the possible strategies that can be adopted for producing such layouts. Finally, we provide an outlook on the possible future research directions on this topic.@en

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

This paper presents our research activities on the design of Web 2.0 applications currently ongoing at Politecnico di Milano. Our approaches are based on model-driven development techniques: in particular, they extend Web 1.0 models to cope with the technological characteristics of the new applications and exploit design patterns to capture the desired behaviors. Two main research activities are presented, considering two orthogonal issues of Web 2.0 applications: the social and the technological aspects. Moreover, other ongoing research directions are outlined.@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