Fine-Grained Specification and Control of Data Flows in Web-Based User Interfaces

When building process-intensive web applications, developers typically spend considerable effort on the exchange of specific data entities between specific web pages and operations under specific conditions, as called for by business requirements. Since the WWW infrastructure provides only very coarse data exchange mechanisms, we introduce a notation for the design of fine-grained conditional data flows between user interface components. These specifications can be interpreted by a data flow controller that automatically provides the data entities to the specified receivers at run-time, relieving developers of the need to implement user interface data flows manually.