Model Driven Engineering of Rich Internet Applications Equipped with Zoomable User Interfaces

The development of a Rich Internet Application is particularly challenging because its user interface can involve highly interactive techniques that require substantive programming that is mostly done by hand nowadays. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a model-driven engineering approach where a zoomable user interface of such a rich Internet application is obtained successively by performing the following steps: the computing independent model level consists of modeling a task for the future interface based on a list of canonical task types augmented by custom tasks, each task being mapped onto a domain model; the platform independent model level consists of exploiting the structure and the temporal operators of this task model in order to generate one or many abstract user interfaces that will lead in turn to concrete user interfaces structured according to the principles of a zoomable user interface at the Platform Specific Model level.