MUIT: A Domain-Specific Language and its Middleware for Adaptive Mobile Web-Based User Interfaces in WS-BPEL

In enterprise organizations, the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) requirement has become prevalent as employees use their own mobile devices to process the workflow-oriented tasks. Consequently, it calls for approaches that can quickly develop and integrate mobile user interactions into existing business processes, and adapt to various contexts. However, designing, developing, and deploying adaptive and mobile-oriented user interfaces for existing process engines are non-trivial, and require significant systematic efforts. To address this issue, we present a novel middleware-based approach, called MUIT, to developing and deploying the Mobility, User Interactions and Tasks into WS-BPEL engines. MUIT provides a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that provides some intuitive facilities to support the declarative development of adaptive, mobile-oriented, and Web-based user interfaces in WS-BPEL. The DSL can significantly reduce developers’ manual efforts of developing user interactions by preventing arbitrarily mixed code, and its runtime supports satisfactory user experiences. Additionally, MUIT can be seamlessly integrated into WS-BPEL without intrusions of existing process instances. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype by integrating MUIT into the commodity WS-BPEL-based Apusic Platform, and evaluate the performance and usability of MUIT platform.