Design of a framework for dynamic content adaptation to Web-enabled terminals and enterprise applications

Abstract

The paper describes the design of a framework for enterprise Web applications that adapts their contents to various types of Web-enabled terminals, such as wearable devices, PDAs, and automobile PCs. Such terminals have different capabilities as regards their processing units, user interaction, and communication. Thus, applications must dynamically adapt their contents to each type of device when they provide service sessions. On the other hand, applications that serve various dynamic contents from databases and transactions need to be connected to back-end systems, namely, business objects designed independently of the Web applications. For reuse and easy development of such adaptive and enterprise systems, the framework should separate three concerns: (1) design of business objects, (2) design of logical Web contents, and (3) design of the content adaptation. The paper reports the author's experience in designing, implementing, and applying a framework to a banking system using small display devices, and discusses the design.