Widgets and composition mechanism for service creation by ordinary users

Significant research work has been conducted in software engineering to facilitate and speed up the process of service creation by experienced developers. Recently, however, service creation by ordinary users has attracted more and more attention as non-technical people have begun to play an active role in service life cycles, especially in a Web 2.0 context. In addition, service creation by ordinary users tackles the heterogeneity, the dynamicity, and the spontaneous nature of users needs. We show that current technologies are mainly inspired by previous approaches and architectures conceived for experienced developers, which means that they are not really adequate for service creation by ordinary users. This article proposes a novel service creation environment for ordinary users. It is made up of a new Widget abstraction layer that exposes the graphical user interface of services as reusable components, and relies on a two-step mechanism to compose these services at runtime. A proof of concept prototype has been built. The new abstraction layer offers interfaces that are much more user friendly than the current service creation tools. It also enables the different capabilities of a service to be seamlessly handled throughout its usage lifecycle.