Widget - Oriented Consumer Programming

Today’s consumer network applications are composed of complex sets of interconnected hardware and software components. Application providers build component-level workflows to provide required functional properties and quality of service (QoS). However, to enhance the quality of user experience (QoE), applications are nowadays exposed to consumers as sets of widgets, i.e. compact and fully functional application modules displayed in a web browser. Widgets are built for various application domains, such as personal finance management or highlyspecialized analyses of oceanographic, climate, and atmospheric data. To augment application’s built-in QoS settings with personalized QoE properties, consumers define personalized workflows on top of widgets. They select widgets using QoE-related criteria, such as widget data source reliability, data processing, and presentation features and interact with them through a graphical user interface (GUI). To automate consumers’ manual operations over a set of widgets, we present Geppeto, a consumer-oriented framework for programming application-level workflows over widgets. Geppeto uses consumer-programmable widgets that integrate a set of application-specific widgets into the workflow and become integral parts of an application. The proposed framework enables each individual consumer to build personalized QoE-aware applications. Furthermore, the community is empowered with enormous application development potential, because of the large number of web consumers who can participate in software development.