Extending User-Interface Toolkits with Hypermedia Functionality

This paper1 describes a technique for extending user-interface toolkits with hypermedia functionality. The technique employs a separation-of-concerns approach which is incremental, reusable, and maintainable. The essence of the approach is to integrate a user-interface toolkit with an open hypermedia system. The integration occurs through a set of integrated widgets and a hypermedia infrastructure. The infrastructure acts as a gateway between the toolkit and the open hypermedia system. The integrated widgets use the infrastructure to augment their behavior with hypermedia services. Applications constructed with the resulting toolkit contain hypermedia-enabled widgets, automatically providing consistent cross-application hypermedia services with little effort required by the application developer. The benefits of generalizing the technique to other services, such as groupware, are also discussed.