AN ENGINEERING PERSPECTIVE ON STRUCTURAL COMPUTING: DEVELOPING STRUCTURE SERVICES FOR THE WEB
Keywords:
Structural computing, service-oriented architecture, hypermedia engineering, rapid prototyping, design patternsAbstract
The emergence of Component-Based Open Hypermedia Systems aims at releasing hypermedia and web applications from the monocracy of link as an information structuring primitive. Instead, an open set of structure servers – each one providing abstractions and semantics relevant to a specific data-organization domain – are employed by an open set of client applications. Nonetheless, the lack of an engineering framework guiding the development and deployment process of structure servers has a part in their limited exploitation. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of structure servers from an engineering approach, and we propose a software methodology and a set of potential tools in order to direct their development. In addition, we present how this methodology is supported by the Callimachus CB-OHS, emphasizing on the tools enabling rapid prototyping of new structure servers.
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