A Browser-Based Middleware for Service-Oriented Rich Client

Along with the proliferation of web-delivered services and the wide adoption of popular Web technologies, it has been an emerging development style that composes service-oriented applications with rich user experiences in the web browser. Currently, these service-oriented rich client (SoRC) applications are usually tightly coupled with specific requirements and scenarios, without the solutions of common problems for development, deployment and operation. It leads to the fact that SoRC applications are exactly done in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a new type of middleware, which is embedded in web browsers and encapsulates reusable solutions for common problems. This browser-embedded middleware consists of a container managing component instances, a set of communication mechanisms coordinating both browser-server and inter-browser interactions. Different SoRC applications can be constructed more easily based on the middleware. In the case study, we construct a mashup environment, called iMashup, with the middleware and compare it with some popular environments. The comparison shows that iMashup provides composition capabilities with less implementation efforts, occupies much lower memory consumption and achieves more scalability.