Service-Oriented Architecture for Supporting Collaborative User Interface Development

Professionals working in organizations that conduct any user interface development life cycle are more and more involved in a collaborative setup where competences and resources are distributed in time and space. In order to support this shift of practice, a service-oriented architecture is defined and developed according to principles of model management. In this paradigm, user interaction development is decomposed into activities, which could be supported by model management operations. These operations are in turn converted into services, developed according to the service-oriented architecture. A distributed user interaction development life cycle consequently involves the following steps: a method engineer defines the activities to be conducted for the user interface of a project, the method definition is imported in the software architecture to enact the method by assigning responsibilities to team members, and these members then perform their responsibilities through the services corresponding to the operations. This paper also presents a taxonomy of services for supporting the user interface development life cycle that is unique.