Application composition at the presentation layer: alternatives and open issues

The concept of application composition at the presentation layer, i.e., the development of web applications with user interfaces (UI) starting from stand-alone, reusable components, is a relatively new research area. The recent advent of web mashups and component-based web applications has produced promising results, but we argue that there is still a lot of space for improvement. By looking at three advanced approaches in this area, we investigate the current solution space and consequently unveil challenges and problems still to be solved in order to turn presentation composition into common practice.