Towards Formal Specification of Client-Server Interactions for a Wide Range of Internet Applications

  • Authors:
  • Vadim V. Doubrovski

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • WI '01 Proceedings of the First Asia-Pacific Conference on Web Intelligence: Research and Development
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Traditional way of designing Internet applications involves writing code for programming the sequence of pages presented to the client and associated decision-making logic. This makes the interaction flow of an application unclear and reduces its maintainability. A formal method of expressing interactions in an Internet application that is based on the notion of Interaction Machine is proposed. Such formalism can be mapped to interaction specifications expressed in XML that can be interpreted by an application-neutral universal controller. Additional advantages of the proposed universal controller include full synchronization between the client and the server (a well-known problem for Internet applications), preservation of complete history of application context that allows for true rollbacks and resumption of long-suspended applications. The approach can be used for implementing a wide range of applications including standard HTML-based applications, WML-based WAP and Business-to-Business XML-based applications.