High-level design and analysis of web applications | Ziv Yosef Shapira
| | Abstract | Design of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI), i.e. the screen structure, and Interaction Patterns, i.e. the architecture of navigation between the screens, has developed in the transition to Web applications architecture. The influence of the new architecture on the design is influenced by the technologies, such as Web browsers and communication protocols, such as HTTP. However, the methods in which this design is created or illustrated have remained basic, such as textual description or illustrative. There is also a lack of ability to relate the proposed design and the original system requirements. Furthermore we found it difficult to investigate properties of the design automatically because the description is often not formalized. Types of such properties would be: navigational, functional and architectural.
In this thesis we investigate a method both for generating effective designs of Web application navigational schemes and for describing the design. We relate between system requirements and Web Interaction Patterns (a.k.a. Navigational Design Patterns). We also introduce a software application which allows pattern designer to define patterns or combine basic patterns into more complex ones. A Web-application designer can use the tool to describe the design using patterns and investigate the design properties automatically.
A case study is introduced to demonstrate both the theoretical and the practical parts of this thesis. The current design of the system is compared to a proposed design using the application, developed during this thesis. | | Keywords | Web applications, Navigational patterns, HCI, Software Design | | Type | Master's thesis [Academic thesis] | | Year | 2004 | | Publisher | Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU | | Address | Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby | | Note | Supervised by Michael R. Hansen | | Electronic version(s) | [pdf] | | BibTeX data | [bibtex] | | IMM Group(s) | Computer Science & Engineering |
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