HTML5 visual composition of REST-like web services

In this paper we discuss a visual programming environment for the composition of services based on dataflow paradigm. This approach, strongly oriented towards web technologies, aims to offer the corporate application designer an integrated set of very high-level tools to design and test new services via functional composition of already available ones. The user experience is a mixture of (a) graphical actions and choices, for example the drag and drop of graphical widgets and the connection of input-output links, and of (b) interface coding, via the textual specification of the translation logic of data object types flowing through the input/output interfaces of the composed services. The new environment, named VisProSL (Visual Programming Service-Link), capitalizes on a standardized JSON syntax of exchanged data objects, is oriented to REST services, and makes use of a basic layer that provides the visual generation of interfaces towards location services.