Abstract
There is an increasing gap between web services and web applications. While web services communicate via typed interfaces (e.g., using WSDL and SOAP), many web applications still rely on untyped, manually programmed forms in the restricted HTML widget set. These limitations cause developers to resort to HTML with client-side scripting, resulting in applications that can be hard to maintain. The goal of our work is to close the gap and ease maintenance by providing a browser technology that relies on declarative specifications and supports a fully typed interaction model. To this end, we have implemented Spreans, a type-aware spreadsheet that edits hierarchical data, supports a rich widget set, and includes browser functionality by implementing an interface to web services. The use of Spreans as a browser replaces the main uses of client-side scripting (calculations, constraint checking, and UI embellishment) by declarative specification, thus simplifying maintenance.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adachi, Y.: Intellisheet: A Spreadsheet System Expanded by Including Constraint Solvers. In: HCC 2001: Proc. IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments, pp. 173–179. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2001)
Atkins, D., Ball, T., Bruns, G., Cox, K.: Mawl: a domain-specific language for form-based services. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 25(3), 334–346 (1999)
Brabrand, C., Møller, A., Ricky, M., Schwartzbach, M.I.: Powerforms: Declarative client-side form field validation. World Wide Web Journal 3(4), 205–214 (2000)
Burnett, M., Atwood, J., Djang, R.W., Gottfried, H., Reichwein, J., Yang, S.: Forms/3: A First-Order Visual Language to Explore the Boundaries of the Spreadsheet Paradigm. J. of Functional Programming 11(2), 155–206 (2001)
Draheim, D., Weber, G.: Strongly Typed Server Pages. In: Halevy, A.Y., Gal, A. (eds.) NGITS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2382, p. 29. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Draheim, D., Weber, G.: Form-Oriented Analysis - A New Methodology to Model Form-Based Applications. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Dubinko, M., Software, C., Klotz, L.L., Merrick, R., Raman, T.V.: XForms 1.0 – W3C Recommendation. Technical Report REC-xforms-20031014, World Wide Web Consortium (October 2003)
Fischer, G., Giaccardi, E., Ye, Y., Sutcliffe, A., Mehandjiev, N.: Meta-Design: a Manifesto for End-User Development. Communications of the ACM 47(9), 33–37 (2004)
I. O. for Standardization. Final Committee Draft of ISO Schematron. Technical Report ISO/IEC FDIS 19757-3, ISO/IEC
Jones, C.: End-User Programming. IEEE Computer 28(9), 68–70 (1995)
Segev, A.: Enabling Design-Centric eBusiness Applications. In: Halevy, A.Y., Gal, A. (eds.) NGITS 2002. LNCS, vol. 2382, p. 1. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Stadelmann, M.: A spreadsheet based on constraints. In: UIST 1993: Proc. 6th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 217–224. ACM Press, New York (1993)
Thiemann, P.: WASH/CGI: Server-Side Web Scripting with Sessions and Typed, Compositional Forms. In: Krishnamurthi, S., Ramakrishnan, C.R. (eds.) PADL 2002. LNCS, vol. 2257, p. 192. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Whang, K.-Y., Ammann, A., Bolmarcich, A., Hanrahan, M., Hochgesang, G., Huang, K.-T., Khorasani, A., Krishnamurthy, R., Sockut, G., Sweeney, P., Waddle, V., Zloof, M.: Office-by-example: an integrated office system and database manager. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 5(4), 393–427 (1987)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Draheim, D., Thiemann, P., Weber, G. (2006). A Spreadsheet Client for Web Applications. In: Etzion, O., Kuflik, T., Motro, A. (eds) Next Generation Information Technologies and Systems. NGITS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4032. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11780991_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11780991_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-35472-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-35473-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)