Web developers face two significant challenges when developing their applications and websites: latency and payload size. Given that web services rely on servers, the related communication incurs a cost in terms of latency. In contrast, the payload passed to the client incurs a communication cost, not to mention the computational cost to the client. The concept of serverless edge computing, built on top of content delivery networks (CDNs), is an approach that has begun to gain the attention of web developers for its promise of lower latencies due to its efficiencies in communication thanks to globally distributed networks and replication. Islands architecture is a technical approach that addresses payload size by giving developers easy ways to defer and potentially even avoid the cost of loading content. Combined, these two approaches form edge-powered islands and, in this article, we examine how the combination can help to address these two notable costs web developers have to consider in their daily work. Our findings indicate that edge-powered islands can provide a way to introduce interactivity to otherwise static websites while wrapping dynamic portions of a page within islands to gain the benefits of static approaches in more dynamic contexts, such as storefronts. In addition, islands can provide loading benefits even for more application-like websites, such as social networks, and give web developers an additional control layer in their development work.

Web Applications have become an omnipresent part of our daily lives. They are easy to use, but hard to develop. WYSIWYG editors, form builders, mashup editors, and markup authoring tools ease the development of Web Applications. However, more advanced Web Applications require servers-side programming, which is beyond the skills of end-user developers. In this paper, we discuss how declarative languages can simplify Web Application development and empower end-users as Web developers. We first identify nine end-user Web Application development levels ranging from simple visual customization to advanced three-tier programming. Then, we propose expanding the presentation tier to support all aspects of Web Application development. We introduce a unified XForms-based framework—called XFormsDB—that supports both client-side and server-side Web Application development. Furthermore, we make a language extension proposal—called XFormsRTC—for adding true real-time communication capabilities to XForms. We also present XFormsDB Integrated Development Environment (XIDE), which assists end-users in authoring highly interactive data-driven Web Applications. XIDE supports all Web Application development levels and, especially, promotes the transition from markup authoring and snippet programming to single and unified language programming.

Assistive living technologies can help the elderly and the people with disabilities with their daily life. The smart building solutions provide means to implement these systems in homes and can offer valuable applications, for example, an alarming service notifying relatives in case of irregular behavior. However, different systems are generally not able to intelligently communicate with each other, decreasing the usability of such technologies. We propose a new kind of general smart building system model aiming for flexibility and interoperability by offering different parts of the system to behave and cooperate intelligently. We present our implementation of the system with an anticipation method for the lighting control. It anticipates user's intention to enter to the space and thus removes the general system delay and offers more comfortable experience for the user.

Smart spaces, either public or private, has been a hot topic for more than a decade. They are claimed to bring various advantages for their users. However, only few people are actually using smart spaces. One of the reasons for that is the lack of attention paid to user interfaces used to control the space. Both industrial and academic research is often focused on hardware and device interoperability issues. There is not enough studies about end-user mental models, how and why people want to control and program smart spaces. In this position paper, we propose a strategy of how to bring end-user programming in smart spaces into real life. Our idea is three-fold: 1) concentrate on users' mental models, 2) create intuitive ubiquitous user interface, which combines the direct interaction pattern and the magnetic poetry interface metaphor, and 3) install a control system in a public smart space, where a lot of people can use it on daily basis. We aim to conduct a long term user study, from which we are planning to get unique data about evolution of people's expectations and mental models in the context of smart space control.

In future buildings, all devices will be connected directly to the Internet, surrounding people with a Web of Things. That will bring the amazing possibility to control building facilities from any device with Internet access (PC, mobile phone, etc.). However, while it is already technically possible to connect devices directly to IP networks, most of home and building automation systems still use non-IP field level communication protocols. In this paper we describe an integration platform, which is an intermediate step between future IP based systems and available legacy equipment. The platform uses Web services technology for connecting devices to a stand-alone server. This approach makes the system flexible and independent from underlying platform and communication protocols. Conducted measurements with our oBIX based implementation show that our system model is efficient and can be deployed on cheap embedded devices with limited resources for computing.

Multimedia devices, services, and content are already distributed inside the home network. Mobility, sharing and IP based delivery mechanisms introduce additional challenges to accessibility by extending the range of distribution into interconnected home and Internet scale scenarios. However, the user should be able to access any of these targets in a satisfying, easy, and uniform way despite the differences in target and interaction device technologies. This paper proposes and demonstrates how RESTful and declarative approach could be used in solving extended accessibility and usability problems. In the proposed solution, the network becomes the media center, as one of the networked devices operates as a hub between targets and UI devices, while the actual media is streamed in out of band P2P fashion.

This article presents a graphics software architecture for next-generation digital television receivers. We propose that such receivers should include a standardised Java-based procedural environment capable of rendering 2D/3D graphics and video, and a declarative environment supporting W3C recommendations such as SMIL and XForms. We also introduce a graphics architecture model that meets such requirements. As a proof-of-concept, a prototype implementation of the model is presented. This implementation enhances television content by allowing the user to play 3D graphics games, to run Java applications, and to browse XML-based documents while meeting current hardware restrictions.

Small and varying screen sizes of mobile devices pose a big problem for digital Teletext service to display its content. It is difficult to display all the text information on a small screen, where page scroll or transparent page to live video is not practical. This paper presents an adaptive text extraction method which can automatically extract key information from original text and keep semantic meanings as close as possible. We combine both statistical methods and coarse coding algorithm from neural science to shorten long text sentences in terms of generalization. The experiment results show that the methods are efficient and effective.

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) 2.0 has a support for user interactions with its declarative event timing and temporal hyperlinking model. However, complex Web applications require more control over multimedia presentations. This is achieved with a support for a scripting language. The result is Dynamic SMIL, a combination of SMIL and a scripting language. We present the design and implementation of a player for Dynamic SMIL. It consists of a SMIL 2.0 player and a facility to run scripts with the help of XML Events. The SMIL player is also integrated into an XML browser, X-Smiles, thus enabling playing SMIL with XForms, XSL FO, SVG, and XHTML.

Interactive Television is fast becoming a necessity as it converges the popular web browsing and the standard television systems better. This paper discusses the underlying system - Operating system and Java Runtime Environment - for the Digital TV. A review of the needed system capabilities for Digital TV, a probable solution of the underlying system, and future improvisation of the system are dealt herewith.

World Wide Web Consortium is currently specifying XForms form language, which is intended to be the next generation language for Web forms. XForms is not currently supported by the major browsers, which prevents the early utilization of XForms. In this paper, we describe our implementation of XForms. The implementation is part of our X-Smiles browser, which is an open source XML browser.

Digital television user interfaces are composed of text, graphics and video. Usability issues that arise include information visualization, searching and navigation. This paper introduces two user interface prototypes for digital television. Both prototypes were tested with real users and the test results are discussed.

Text TV is one of the most important services of the forthcoming digital television. In this article, we discuss how text TV can be implemented using XML. The content is defined using XML, while the spatial and procedural relationships of the media elements are defined using XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) and ECMAScript (European Computer Manufacturers' Association Scripting language), respectively. This approach allows the display of the text TV content in an XML browser. Since digital television set-top boxes (i.e. receivers) won't have a XML browser in the near future, a separate Java application was also designed to display the content. The spatial and procedural relationships of the media component are then pre-defined within the Java application. Our approach allows the development of the text TV content using XML and its display in both the Internet and the digital TV environment.

The goal of this work was to develop an improved defect detection scheme for high-speed real-time web surface inspection. This goal was realized by splitting the task into two independent parts: feature extraction and segmentation. Both parts were implemented using efficient algorithms which were implemented in hardware that is suitable and fast enough to be included in a working web inspection system. The proposed scheme is based on some derived texture features and a new self-organizing map variant, the statistical self-organizing map. These techniques offer several improvements over the gray-level thresholding techniques that have been traditionally used in commercial web inspection systems.

The authors previously introduced a fuzzy version of Kohonen's well-known self-organizing map neural network model. In this novel neuro-fuzzy system, the neurons of Kohonen's original model are replaced by fuzzy rules. Each fuzzy rule is composed of fuzzy sets and an output singleton. Since the fuzzy self-organizing map is a modified version of Kohonen's original model, the self-organizing map and the learning vector quantization learning laws can be used to tune the neuro-fuzzy system. Originally, the fuzzy self-organizing map was intended to be used as an unknown function approximator, while Kohonen's self-organizing map is primarily used as a neural classifier. In this paper, the authors show how the fuzzy self-organizing map can also be used as a neuro-fuzzy classifier. Simulation results show that, in chemical agent detection, the fuzzy self-organizing map not only gives better classification results than Kohonen's model, but it also has smaller number of fuzzy rules than the corresponding neurons required by Kohonen's self-organizing map.