Enabling an End-User Driven Approach for Managing Evolving User Interfaces in Business Web Applications - A Web Application Architecture Using Smart Business Object

As web applications become the centre-stage of today’s businesses, they require a more manageable and holistic approach to handle the rapidity and diversity with which changes occur in their web user interfaces. Adopting the End User Development (EUD) paradigm, we advocate an end-user driven approach to maintain evolving user interfaces of business web applications. Such an approach, demands a complementary web application architecture to enable a flexible, managed, and fine-grained control over the web user interfaces. In this paper, we proposed a web application architecture that embraces a dedicated UI Definition Layer, enforced by a web UI Model, for describing changes in the user interfaces of business web applications. This empowers business users to use intuitive web-based tools to effortlessly manage and create web user interfaces. The proposed architecture is realised through the Smart Business Object (SBO) technology we previously developed. We have also created a toolkit based on our proposed architecture. A tailored version of the toolkit has been utilised in an enterprise level web-based workflow application.