Rapid development of web interfaces to heterogeneous systems

Abstract

The general problem addressed in this paper is the rapid development of web interfaces to software systems using only their command line interface. This kind of system is frequently developed in environments that greatly differ from those where web interface will be implemented. In this setting it is also important to maintain a loose coupling between the web interface and the system it controls since the latter must be able to continue its normal development independently of the former. We propose a framework to develop web interfaces targeted to these systems whose main feature is the fact that it can be extended without requiring code programming. The hot spots of our framework are XML configuration files to define the interface data, how this data is mapped into the system's commands, and how commands output and the interaction state is mapped into web formatting languages. With this approach the web interface is kept separated from the system it controls, it is easy to define and modify, and is able to capture enough domain knowledge to be a real advantage for the novice or sporadic user. In this paper we present the proposed framework architecture, loosely inspired in the MVC pattern, its implementation on Java servlet containers, and its application to the AGILMAT system, a high-school mathematical problem generator developed using constrained grammars.