A presentation service for rapidly building interactive collaborative web applications

Web applications have become a large segment of the software development domain but their rapid rise in popularity has far exceeded the support in software engineering. There are many tools and techniques for web application development, but the developer must still learn and use many complex protocols and languages. Products still closely bind data operations, business logic, and the user interface, limiting integration and interoperability. This thesis introduces an innovative new presentation service to help web application developers create better applications faster, and help them build high quality web user interfaces. This service acts as a broker between web browsers and applications, adding value with programming-language independent object-oriented technology. The second innovation is a generic graphics applet (GGA) component for the web browser user interface. This light component provides interactive graphics support for the creation of business charts, maps, diagrams, and other graphical displays in web applications. The combination of a presentation service program (BUS) and the GGA is explored in a series of experiments to evaluate their ability to improve web applications. The experiments provide evidence that the BUS and GGA technology enhances web application designs