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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF SERVICE-BASEDINTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS USING SERVICEANNOTATIONSMarius Feldmann, Felix Martens, Georg Berndt, Josef Spillner and Alexander SchillChair of Computer NetworksTechnische Universität DresdenDresden, GermanyABSTRACTThis paper presents an innovative development approach for creating Service-based interactive applications. Incomparison to further existing approaches enabling the creation of this type of applications our approach fully buildsupon the concept of Service annotations. Besides presenting the general idea behind our approach, an overview of aspecific tool is given, enabling the rapid development of Service-based interactive applications.KEYWORDSWeb Services, Service annotations, interactive applications, development methodology1. INTRODUCTIONNowadays, Web Services are one of the most important means for developing distributed applications. Manytools for their creation, deployment and runtime management have been produced and were introduced intovarious software development environments such as NetBeans or Eclipse. Due to their characteristics, WebServices are a promising tool for simplifying the development of interactive applications. By using functionalinterface descriptions as a starting-point, a basic form-based UI can be derived easily by applying aninference mechanism that analyzes available Service operations and their parameters and creates appropriateinput and output views based on the schema information (Spillner 2007). It is evident that the mechanismleads to very simple user interfaces only. Particularly in times of "Web 2.0" applications with dynamic andreactive UIs offering various support functionalities such as direct input validation or suggestion capabilities,this basic approach does not lead to satisfying results. For improving the results of the automatic generationmechanism, additional information is necessary which can be attached to functional interface descriptions inthe form of Service annotations. In this paper, an approach is presented for using Service annotations notonly for expressing aspects reusable in various application contexts but additionally for describing navigationand data flows within interactive applications. By this, Service annotations are used as the only necessarydesign-time model for creating Service-based interactive applications thus making additional models forapplication representation unnecessary. This work-in-progress paper extends the concept of Serviceannotations to describe application-specific aspects and introduces an authoring tool enabling the rapiddevelopment of Service-based interactive applications. For full understanding the content of this paper, thework presented in (Janeiro et al. 2009) should be present to the reader.2. BACKGROUNDThe idea of Service annotations for describing user interface related aspects has been introduced in (Kassoffet al. 2003) and has initially been exclusively used for the ad-hoc generation of user interfaces for single WebServices. The most enhanced approach addressing this type of annotation exploration is the Dynvocationproject (Spillner 2008). Since the realization of the project ServFace between the years 2008 and 2010,319