Computer Engineering Cider Seminars

An explosive increase in the need for personalization of consumer Web applications requires that consumers develop applications by themselves. A widely used architecture for the development of consumer Web applications is an event-driven component-based application framework. Such frameworks enable composition of components into personalized event-driven workflows. Instead of using formal and abstract software components, such as objects and services in object-oriented and service-oriented programming models, our consumer programming tools utilize the widget-oriented programming model, in which applications are built from widgets [1] (e.g., Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Netvibes Universal Widgets) that are understandable and intuitive to consumers. However, nowadays consumer programming tools do not allow consumers to define their event-driven workflows. Therefore, in order to enable consumers to built event-driven workflows, we extended our consumer programming model [2, 3] to the widget-oriented event-driven programming model.

In this talk, we present our event-driven consumer programming model. First, it provides component integration and interoperability widgets which enable consumers to define event-driven workflows between third-party widgets. Second, it enables consumers to embed their applications into the real world environment, providing generic widgets for time and location controlled workflows, as well as widgets which enable consumers to integrate physical gadgets from the real world with virtual software gadgets, i.e. widgets, into unified event-driven workflows. Third, since critical, special purpose, and system components are designed by programmers, the model provides widgets which enable consumers to integrate object/service-oriented and widget-oriented systems.

In a short demo, we will present several widgets used to define various event-driven workflows that are developed as part of our work on the Geppeto project. The Geppeto project is sponsored by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, and supported through the Google Research Award program.

1 S. Srbljic: From Composing Services to Composing Gadgets
Google Tech Talk, January 17, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNg79vjbRNA

2 S. Srbljic, I. Zuzak, J. Krolo, I. Gavran: Geppeto: Promoting End-users to Gadget Developers
Google Tech Talk, May 28, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbUvCdADz_A&feature=channel

3 S. Srbljic, M. Silic, K. Vladimir, M. Popovic: Geppeto: Consumer's Approach to Programming
Google Tech Talk, November 11, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5iI1W344I&feature=channel

Professor Sinisa Srbljic, Ph.D., is currently a professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, and head of the CCL Lab. His career also spans Silicon Valley where he worked on large-scale distributed systems at AT&T Labs. He was visiting the University of Toronto, where he worked on the NUMAchine multiprocessor project, and the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include consumer Web computing and widget-oriented programming. In teaching, he is involved in the theory of computing, programming language translation, service-oriented computing, and network middleware systems.

Dejan Skvorc is a computer science Ph.D. candidate at School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He received his B.Sc. degree in 2003 and M.Sc. degree in 2006, both from School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. During the 2007, Dejan Skvorc spent four months as a software engineering intern in Google's Mountain View office with Google Gadgets group. He is a coauthor and one of the architects of the inter-gadget communication framework based on the publish-subscribe paradigm - the PubSub framework. His research interests include service-oriented architectures, end-user development, and consumer programming.

Goran Delac is a computer science Ph.D. candidate and research assistant at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. He is working on the design and development of Geppeto project.