Abstract
Contemporary consumer applications are often deployed as sets of widgets, which are compact application modules that are executed within a web browser (e.g., Google Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Microsoft Gadgets, Netvibes Universal Widgets). By using several different widgets consumers can create personalized workflow applications and enhance their QoE properties. The widgets are selected based on various criteria such as data source reliability, data processing, and presentation features. Consumers interact with widgets through a graphical user interface (GUI).
One of the goals of our research is to find a methodology for automation of consumers? manual operations over a set of widgets. To that end, we developed Geppeto (http://geppeto.fer.hr), a consumer-oriented framework for programming widget-level workflows. Instead of using formal and abstract software artifacts, such as objects and services in object-oriented and service-oriented programming models, Geppeto utilizes widget-oriented programming model, in which applications are built from widgets that are perceptive and intuitive for users [1]. Widget-level workflows are defined via programming by demonstration [2]. In contrast to traditional programming techniques that rely on API invocations, Geppeto leverages intuitive GUI actions which are represented in tabular form [3].
In order to enable consumers to build personalized widget-oriented applications, several special purpose widgets are required to control the execution of application-specific widgets within a particular workflow. In this talk, we present three types of special purpose widgets which can be used to integrate application-specific widgets into time-initiated, event-initiated, and consumer-initiated workflows. We present a short demo of how consumers who have no programming training can use consumer-programmable widgets to implement their ideas as creative software solutions. We believe that tools such as Geppeto make consumer creativity an emerging QoE metric of future network applications. The Geppeto project is sponsored by Croatian Ministry of Science and Education, and through 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. Popovi?: Geppeto: Consumer?s Approach to Programming
Google Tech Talk, November 11, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5iI1W344I&feature=channel
Biography
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 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. His is working on the design and development of Geppeto project.